We’re almost done with the “Basics” of Chess. You now know all the pieces, all the moves, and all the rules of the game. There is only one topic left before we can start looking at serious games and seeing how real games are played: Notation. This post looks long, and you probably won’t absorb [...]
There are five different ways a game can ind in a draw (or “tie game”). The following is copied directly from the FIDE official rules.
Stalemate - if the player on turn has no legal move but is not in check, this is stalemate and the game is automatically a draw.
Threefold repetition - if an identical [...]
Stalemate
Stalemate is a situation in chess where the player whose turn it is to move is not in check but has no legal moves. One of the rules of chess is that stalemate ends the game, with the result a draw.
Occasionally, if you are in an inferior position, you might try to put yourself into [...]
Yesterday, we saw that when your King is in check, you MUST do something to protect it by doing one of the following things:
Capture the attacking piece
Move another piece between your King and the attacker
Move the King out of danger.
In the example yesterday, none of these options were possible, so the game was over. Let’s [...]
Chess Basics #11: Checkmate
By this point, we’ve talked about how all the pieces move, so it’s almost time to start actually playing. One last topic we need to cover first, though, is how to win, lose or draw.
Winning and Losing is done through what is called “Checkmate.” This is a situation where the King is [...]
Chess Basics #10: En Passant
Yesterday, we looked at pawn promotion, a special move for the pawns. Today is another special pawn move called “En Passant.” En passant is French for “In Passing,” and it’s a special Pawn vs. Pawn attack. Look at the position below. It’s currently Black’s turn to move. Black wants to move [...]
Chess Basics #9: Pawn Promotion
As we saw a few days ago, Pawns can only move forward. Eventually, they run out of room on the other side of the board. Rather than have pawns end up uselessly trapped against the backside of the board, chess has a rule called “Pawn Promotion.” If a Pawn makes it [...]
Right now, you know all the basic moves for every piece on the board. There are three special moves that we still need to cover. Today we will look at a very common situation and a special move called “Castling.”
First, notice that the diagrams look different. Starting today, we’re going to be using diagrams that [...]
Chess Basics #7: The King
The moves for the king are easy to remember; he can move in one square in any direction.
The King moves in the same directions as a Queen, but with a much more limited range. He also kills in the same way. In the diagram below, the white king can capture any [...]
Chess Basics #6: The Pawn
Pawns are the “foot soldiers” in chess. You get eight of them, unlike only one or two each of the other pieces. Also, they can only move forward (you don’t want foot soldiers retreating in battle, do you?).
Here is the layout of the pawns at the start of the game:
They all [...]
