How to play chess

Setting up the board

Chess is played on an eight-by-eight board of alternating light and dark squares. Turn it so each player has a light square in their own right-hand corner. Files run up and down and are lettered a to h from White's left; ranks run across and are numbered 1 to 8 starting at White's side. Every square therefore has a name: e4, g7, a1.

Each side has sixteen pieces. The back rank, from a to h, holds rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook. The queen starts on her own colour — the white queen on the light square d1, the black queen on the dark square d8. The eight pawns fill the rank in front. White moves first, and after that the turn alternates with no passing and no skipping.

How each piece moves

Every piece except the knight moves in straight lines and is blocked by the first piece it meets. If that piece belongs to the opponent, you may capture it by landing on its square and removing it from the board. You can never capture your own piece, and you can never move through one.

• Pawn — one square straight forward, or two on its very first move. It captures diagonally forward by one square, which means a pawn can be blocked head-on by a piece it cannot take.
• Knight — two squares in one direction and one square at right angles, an L shape. It is the only piece that jumps over others, which makes it awkward to block and dangerous in crowded positions.
• Bishop — any distance diagonally. Each bishop is stuck on the colour it starts on for the whole game, so a pair of bishops covers both colours and a lone bishop covers half the board.
• Rook — any distance along a rank or file. Rooks are clumsy early on and become powerful once files open up.
• Queen — any distance along a rank, file or diagonal. She combines rook and bishop and is worth roughly as much as two rooks.
• King — one square in any direction. He is never captured; the whole game is about the threat of capturing him.

Check, checkmate and the point of the game

When a piece attacks the enemy king, the king is in check. Check is not optional to deal with: you must make a move that ends it, by taking the attacking piece, blocking the line, or moving the king to safety. If none of those is possible, it is checkmate and the game is over immediately.

That last part is the rule that catches beginners out. You may not make a move that leaves your own king in check, and you may not move a piece that is shielding your king if doing so exposes him. Such a piece is pinned, and it is effectively frozen along that line.

Three special moves

Castling moves the king two squares toward a rook and jumps the rook over to the far side of the king. It is the only move that shifts two pieces at once, and it exists to get the king off the centre and connect the rooks. You may castle only if neither the king nor that rook has moved, the squares between them are empty, and the king is not in check, does not land in check, and does not pass through an attacked square.

En passant applies when a pawn makes its two-square jump and lands beside an enemy pawn. On that turn only, the enemy pawn may capture it as if it had moved one square. This exists so that the two-square rule cannot be used to sneak a pawn past a defender.

Promotion happens when a pawn reaches the far rank. It must immediately become a queen, rook, bishop or knight of its own colour. Almost always you take the queen; the rare exception is a knight promotion that gives check or mate.

Piece values and what they are really for

The standard rough count is pawn 1, knight 3, bishop 3, rook 5, queen 9. These numbers are a sanity check, not a law: they help you notice that trading a rook for a bishop usually loses material, but they say nothing about whether a piece is doing anything useful. A knight buried on a1 is worth far less than a knight in the middle of the board.

Look at the knight row. In the centre it reaches eight squares, in the corner only two. That single fact is the whole reason for the advice to develop knights toward the middle.

The five ways a game ends

1. Checkmate — the king is in check and no legal move removes the check. The side giving mate wins.
2. Stalemate — the side to move has no legal move at all but is not in check. This is a draw, not a win, and it is the most common way a winning position gets thrown away.
3. Insufficient material — neither side has enough left to force mate, such as king and bishop against king. Drawn immediately.
4. Threefold repetition — the same position, with the same side to move and the same rights, occurs three times. Either player may claim a draw.
5. The fifty-move rule — fifty moves by each side with no capture and no pawn move. Drawn on claim.

Reading the notation

Moves are written with the piece letter and the destination square: Nf3 means a knight moves to f3. Pawn moves have no letter, so e4 is a pawn to e4. An x marks a capture (Bxc6), a plus sign marks check (Qh5+) and a hash marks checkmate (Qh7#). Castling is O-O kingside and O-O-O queenside. If two identical pieces could reach the same square, the file or rank of the one that moved is added, as in Nbd2.

You do not need notation to play, but the move list beside the board uses it, and every chess book and video assumes it. It is worth ten minutes.

Your first game, step by step

1. Move a centre pawn two squares — e4 or d4. This opens lines for the bishop and the queen.
2. Bring out both knights, usually to f3 and c3 (or f6 and c6 for Black).
3. Bring out a bishop to a square where it sees something, then castle.
4. Connect the rooks by moving the queen off the back rank to a modest square.
5. Only now start looking for a plan — an open file for a rook, a weak square for a knight, a pawn break.

Before every single move, ask one question: what is the opponent threatening? Most beginner games are decided not by clever plans but by unanswered one-move threats.