Chess For Dummies®

Product Information

Most games are won & lost at lower or intermediate levels through tactical errors of one sort or another. En passant must be declared and made as the opponent’s next turn to be legal - otherwise, the player with the chance to capture the pawn loses the opportunity.

Want to know how to play chess for beginners? Here's a basic rundown on how the rules work. In chess, each player takes turns to make a single move. Players cannot choose to skip a turn - they must move a piece. Each chess piece moves in a specific way, and must be moved according to its legal movement. An exception to this is if a pawn is yet to be moved during the game. If a pawn has not yet moved, it may be moved two squares forward as a single move. Both squares must be empty. The player can also choose to move the piece a single square.

Chess rules for beginners

Learn how each type of piece moves. Each player controls 16 pieces: 8 pawns, 2 bishops, 2 knights (little horse heads), 2 rooks (little castle towers), 1 king, and 1 queen. Each type has its own way of moving across the board and potentially capturing your opponent's pieces as it goes. [3] X Research source Each square has a coordinate and each piece is represented by an initial (N for knight, B for bishop, Q for queen, R for rook, and K for king). Castling is permitted when a player’s king piece and a rook have not yet moved during the game. Castling can be performed with either rook, as long as they haven’t moved - in other words, they are still in their starting corners on the edge closest to the controlling player.

Here's a video of IM Danny Rensch explaining all the rules you need to know to start playing chess. Once you know the basics of how to play chess, there are hundreds of books and other resources out there to help you discover the deep strategy and near-endless variations possible during games - as well as local tournaments that can help you refine your play and tactics. It doesn't look that bad to me. Maybe a fun non stressful read. (Not anything like the depth of the Wolff book.) If an opponent’s pawn would have been able to legally capture the moving pawn had it only moved one square instead of two, the opponent can declare en passant on their next turn and move their pawn diagonally onto the square that the pawn passed through - capturing the pawn as if it had only moved one square. Bishops: Go as many squares as possible diagonally. Like the rook, they have to stop at the square just before one of your own pieces, or capture an opponent's piece and stop there.

Notation was invented so that we could analyze chess games after playing them. Thanks to it, we can register the whole game in writing and reproduce it as many times as we want. We must only write down our moves and our opponent's moves correctly. A player can also choose to resign, granting their opponent the victory. Matches can also end in an agreed draw - for example, as the result of stalemate leaving a player without any legal moves, or if no player can win using available legal moves, a situation known as a “dead position”. One example of a dead position is when both players are left with their king as their only remaining piece on the board.