The board, the pieces, and how a game is won

Chess is a game for two people, played on a square board of 64 small squares. One player takes the white pieces and the other takes the black pieces, White moves first, and after that the two sides take turns, one move each. Both sides get exactly the same pieces and nothing on the board is hidden, so no part of the result is luck. The moves themselves take about half an hour to learn.

Each side has a king. A player wins by attacking the enemy king in a way that cannot be answered, and that ending is called checkmate.

The board

That rule plays out on the same board everywhere in the world. The two players sit on opposite sides of it, and the columns running away from a player are called files. The files carry the letters a to h from White's left to White's right. The rows running across are called ranks, and they carry the numbers 1 to 8, with rank 1 on White's side. Every square is named by its file letter and its rank number, so White's near right corner is h1 and the far left corner is a8. The board is always turned so that a light square sits in the right hand corner nearest each player.

The pieces start on the two ranks nearest each player. The rooks stand in the corners, the knights stand beside them, and the bishops stand beside the knights. The two middle squares of the back rank hold the queen and the king, with the queen on the square that matches her own color and the king next to her. The eight pawns fill the whole rank in front. Black sets up the same way, so the two sides face each other as mirror images.

How the pieces move

Six kinds of piece stand on those two ranks, and each kind moves in its own way. A piece captures by landing on an enemy piece's square, and the captured piece leaves the board for good.

The rook moves in a straight line along a file or a rank, as far as it likes, and stops at the first piece in its path. The bishop does the same along the diagonals, so a bishop that starts on a light square stays on light squares for the whole game. The queen moves like a rook and a bishop together, in any of the eight directions, which gives her the longest reach on the board. The knight moves two squares in a straight line and then one square to the side, and it is the only piece that jumps over anything in the way. The king moves one square in any direction, and it may never step onto a square that an enemy piece attacks.

The pawn is the odd one. It moves straight forward one square, or two squares on its first move, and it can never move backwards. It does not capture the way it moves. A pawn captures one square diagonally forward, which is why two pawns standing nose to nose block each other and neither one can pass.

Players count the pieces in points to see who is ahead. A pawn is worth one point, a knight or a bishop three, a rook five, and the queen nine. The king has no point value, because the game ends with it.

Check, checkmate and stalemate

That ending comes in two stages. A king that is under attack is in check, and the player in check has to deal with it on that turn and can do nothing else. The king can move to a square that is not attacked, or the attacking piece can be captured, or a piece can be put in the way of the attack. Any one of the three is enough, and the game goes on.

Checkmate is what happens when none of the three works. The king is attacked, every square it could run to is covered, the attacker cannot be captured, and no piece can get in the line. Nobody ever captures a king and takes it off the board. The game stops right there, and the player who gave the checkmate has won.

Stalemate ends the game like checkmate does, but it counts as a draw instead of a win. It happens when the player to move has no legal move anywhere and the king is not in check, and it stays a draw however far ahead either side is on points. A player who is losing badly often plays for stalemate on purpose.

The three moves that break the pattern

Checkmate and stalemate both come out of the plain piece moves. Three moves are the exceptions, and all three surprise people who have learned only those plain moves.

Castling moves two pieces in one turn. The king slides two squares toward one of its rooks, and that rook jumps over the king and lands on the square the king crossed. It gets the king out of the middle and behind a wall of pawns, and most players do it inside the first ten moves. Castling is legal only when the king and that rook have not moved yet in the game, when the squares between them are empty, and when the king is not in check, does not cross an attacked square and does not land on one.

En passant is a pawn capture with a delay in it. A pawn using its two-square first move can run straight past an enemy pawn that would have been able to capture it, and the rule cancels that escape. If a black pawn on d7 runs to d5 and lands beside a white pawn on e5, White may capture it as if it had stopped on d6. The white pawn lands on d6 and the black pawn comes off the board. The capture is available only on the turn right after the jump.

The third exception is promotion. A pawn that reaches the far rank is exchanged at once for a queen, a rook, a bishop or a knight of the same color. Almost every player asks for the queen, since she is the strongest piece. Nothing stops a player from owning two queens or three, and a game where one pawn is running for the far rank is often decided by whether it arrives.

How a game ends

Even so, a game between experienced players hardly ever runs all the way to checkmate. A player who can see it coming resigns, which means giving up before the finish is played out, and that is normal at every level above beginner.

A draw ends the game with half a point for each player, and stalemate is one of the five ways to reach it. The two players can agree to it and shake hands. The same position can appear three times with the same player to move, which lets either side claim the draw. Fifty moves by each side can go by with no capture and no pawn move, which allows the same claim. And neither side may have enough pieces left to force checkmate, as with a lone king against a king and one bishop.

Almost every game is played with a clock. Each player gets a set amount of time for all of their moves, and the clock runs only while it is that player's turn. A player whose time runs out loses, which chess players call losing on time. If the player who still has time has no possible way to give checkmate with the pieces left, the game is a draw instead.

How much time each side gets has a name. A bullet game gives each player one minute for the whole game, blitz gives three or five minutes, rapid gives ten to fifteen, and a classical tournament game can run for several hours. Many clocks add an increment, so a game listed as 3+2 gives each player three minutes plus two extra seconds after every move they make.

Opening, middlegame, endgame

Inside that time, a game falls into three stretches, and the work is different in each.

The opening is roughly the first ten to fifteen moves. Both sides push a pawn or two into the middle, bring the knights and bishops off the back rank, and castle the king into safety. Players have studied these moves for centuries and named the common ones, like the Italian Game and the Sicilian Defence.

The middlegame starts when the pieces are out and the plans begin. Attacks get built, pieces get traded, and one side usually comes out of it a little ahead on points or in position.

The endgame is what is left when most of the pieces are gone. With so few pieces left the king stops hiding and joins the fight as an attacker, and one extra pawn often wins the game, because it can march to the far rank and turn into a queen.

Nobody has ever worked the whole game out. In a 1950 paper, the American mathematician Claude Shannon put the number of possible chess games at around 10 to the power of 120, far more than the number of atoms in the observable universe.

Reading a written move

A single game still fits on one sheet of paper. Games are written down while they are played, in a short code that chess players everywhere read. A move is the letter of the piece plus the square it lands on, so Nf3 is a knight going to f3 and Bc4 is a bishop going to c4. Pawns have no letter of their own, so a pawn move is written as the square alone, like e4. An x marks a capture, a + marks check and a # marks checkmate, so Qxe5+ is the queen capturing something on e5 and attacking the king. Castling has a symbol of its own, and the version toward the h-file rook is written O-O.

Where the game came from

Those letters and numbers are much newer than the game they record. Chess grew out of chaturanga, played in India around the sixth century, with pieces for infantry, horses, elephants and chariots. Persian players took it up as shatranj, and Arabic players carried it west along North Africa and into Spain. The pieces moved slowly in that version. The piece beside the king moved one square diagonally and no further, so games took a long time to decide.

Around 1475, in Valencia in Spain, players gave that piece the run of the whole board and turned it into the queen, and the bishop got its long diagonal at about the same time. Games that had taken an evening started ending in an hour. That is the version played today, and it spread across Europe and then the rest of the world with little further change.

Organised competition came much later. Wilhelm Steinitz, an Austrian player who treated chess as a set of general principles, beat Johannes Zukertort, the other leading player of the day, in an 1886 match billed as a contest for the world title, and he counts as the first world champion. FIDE, the international federation founded in Paris in 1924, has run the title and the official rules ever since. The world champion today is Gukesh Dommaraju of India, who won the title in 2024 at the age of eighteen.

Playing your first game

The world champion stands at the top of a scale that every other player is on. Every chess site and federation gives its players a rating, which is a single number for playing strength. The system came from Arpad Elo, a physics professor who built it for American chess in the 1960s, and it carries his name wherever it is used. Beating a player rated above you moves your number up sharply, and losing to a weaker one moves it down sharply. A gap of 200 rating points means the stronger player is expected to score about three points out of four. Ratings run from a few hundred for a beginner past 2800 for the best players alive, and the grandmaster title needs a rating over 2500.

A first rating takes an afternoon of games, and any chess site or app then pairs you with someone near your own strength.

1. Learn the six moves cold, so that no piece needs a second thought.
2. Play slow games at first, ten minutes each or more, because fast games hide the mistakes that teach you the most.
3. After each game, hunt for the moves where a piece was lost for nothing, since most games between new players turn on those.
4. Learn to give checkmate with a king and a queen against a lone king, and then with a king and a rook.

Checkmate with a king and a rook takes two minutes to learn. Put a lone black king anywhere, add a white king and a white rook, and walk the black king toward the edge with the rook taking away one rank at a time. When the black king reaches the edge with nowhere to step, that position is checkmate. Every plan in a full game works toward a position like that one.