What chess is, and how a game is won

Chess is a game for two people on a board of 64 squares, and it ends the moment a king is attacked and cannot escape. Almost every other rule can be worked out from that sentence with a board in front of you. You take one color and your opponent takes the other. White moves first, and after that you take turns, one move each. Nothing is hidden from you. There is no deck to draw from and no dice to roll. When you lose, one of your own moves did it.

The moves take about half an hour to learn. Could you sit down tonight and play a real game against a stranger? You could. The first thing you need is a board with the pieces in the right places.

The board and where the pieces stand

Put the board between the two of you. Turn it so that each of you sees a light square in the corner at your right hand.

Your pieces stand on the two rows nearest you. The rooks go in the corners, the knights beside them, and the bishops beside the knights. That leaves the two middle squares for the queen and the king, and the queen takes the one that matches her own color. Your eight pawns fill the row in front, and Black sets up the same way.

Set up like that, not one piece can reach the enemy king yet.

How the pieces move

Learning the six kinds of piece is most of the half hour. Each captures by landing on an enemy piece's square, and the captured piece leaves the board.

Start with the rook, because every other piece gets easier once you have it. The rook slides along its row or its column until it runs into a piece. Tilt that slide onto the diagonals and you have the bishop, which never leaves the color it started on. Put the two slides together and you get the queen, who covers more of an empty board than anything else. The knight does none of that. It moves two squares in a straight line and then one to the side. It is also the only piece that jumps over whatever stands in the way.

The king moves one square in any direction. It may never step onto a square an enemy piece attacks, because no move is allowed to leave your own king under attack.

The pawn is the odd one. It moves straight forward one square and can never go backwards. At that pace a pawn would need six moves to reach the far row, so the rules let it go two squares on its first move. But a pawn does not capture the way it moves. It captures one square diagonally forward, so two pawns nose to nose block each other.

Before you swap a piece for a piece, you want to know the price. Players give the pieces points for that. A pawn is worth one, a knight or a bishop three, a rook five, and the queen nine. The king has no price, because you never trade it and the game ends with it.

Sooner or later one of these pieces attacks the enemy king, and that attack has rules of its own.

Check, checkmate and stalemate

Nobody ever captures a king, because the game stops one step short. A king under attack is in check, and if it is yours, you must deal with it on that turn and can do nothing else. You have three answers. Move the king to a square that is not attacked, capture the attacking piece, or put one of your pieces in the line of the attack.

Checkmate is what happens when none of the three works, and whoever gave it has won.

But the rule leaves one case open, a player whose king is not attacked and who has no legal move anywhere. That is stalemate, and it is a draw, however far ahead either side is. So if you are a queen up and you take the last square a lone king could step to, you have handed the win back.

But play a few games with nothing but those plain moves and you will run into three problems. Each one got a rule bolted on to fix it.

The three moves that break the pattern

The first problem is the king's own square. It starts in the middle of your back row, and the pawns in front of it are the first ones you push to let your bishops and queen out. Within a few moves it stands at the foot of an open column, and walking it to a corner one square at a time costs three or four moves. Castling is the fix. Your king slides two squares toward one of your rooks, and that rook jumps over it onto the square the king crossed, all in one turn. The king lands behind its own pawns, so most players castle inside the first ten moves. It is legal only while that king and rook have not moved, only if the squares between them are empty, and only if the king is not in check, does not cross an attacked square and does not land on one.

The second problem is the pawn's two-square sprint. A pawn of yours on the fifth row guards the square in front of an enemy pawn on the next column, but the sprint skips that square and the enemy pawn lands alongside yours untouched. En passant is the rule that closes the hole. You may capture that pawn as though it had stopped one square short, and your pawn lands on that square. The capture is allowed on that one turn only.

The third problem is what a pawn becomes at the far row. It cannot go forward off the board or back, so a pawn on the far row could never move again. Promotion is the rule that pays it off. You exchange it at once for a queen, a rook, a bishop or a knight of your own color. Almost everybody asks for the queen, but nothing stops you owning two queens or three.

How games really end

With those three patches the rules are complete, and two beginners can play a game through to checkmate tonight. Experienced players hardly ever get that far, because a player who can see checkmate coming resigns instead. Playing on would just cost both of you the rest of the evening to reach a result you can both already see.

Sometimes neither side can win, and the game ends in a draw, half a point each. Stalemate is one of five ways there. Another is agreement, where you offer a draw and your opponent takes it. The next two are claims, and they exist because two players who refuse to agree could otherwise shuffle pieces until morning. If the same position appears three times with the same player to move, either of you can claim the draw. The same claim opens after fifty moves by each side with no capture and no pawn move. The last way is a board where neither side has enough left to force checkmate, as with a lone king against a king and bishop.

Even a game that is heading for a result has to end tonight, so almost every game runs on a clock. Each of you gets a set amount of time for all your moves, and your clock runs only on your turn. If yours runs out you lose. But if the player with time left cannot possibly give checkmate, the game is a draw instead.

Bullet gives each player one minute, blitz three or five, rapid ten or fifteen, and a classical tournament game can run for hours. Many clocks add an increment, so a game listed as 3+2 hands you three minutes plus two seconds every time you move.

Opening, middlegame, endgame

That time gets spent across three stretches of a game. At the start only your pawns and knights can move, because everything else is walled in behind the pawns. So the opening, roughly the first ten or fifteen moves, goes on pushing a pawn into the middle, bringing out the knights and bishops, and castling. 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. That is where you will win or lose most of your games. You build attacks and trade pieces off. One side usually comes out a little ahead on points.

The endgame is what is left when most of the pieces are gone. With so few attackers left, your king stops hiding and joins in. One extra pawn often wins from there, because it can march to the far row and turn into a queen.

You can learn all three stretches and still not learn chess, because nobody has ever worked the whole game out. In a 1950 paper the 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. So the studied openings run out, and from there you are on your own.

Writing a move down

What you find out there is worth keeping, and the way you keep a game is to write it down. To write a move down, the square the piece landed on needs a name. That is what the light corner was for. The columns running away from you are files, lettered a to h from White's left. The rows across are ranks, numbered 1 to 8, with rank 1 on White's side. A square takes its file letter and its rank number, so the light corner at White's right hand is h1. The enemy pawn that sprinted past your pawn on e5 ran from d7 to d5. Set the board up wrong and every game you ever read is mirrored.

A move is the letter of the piece plus the square it lands on, so Nf3 is a knight going to f3. Pawns have no letter of their own, so a pawn move is the square alone, like e4. Castling toward the h-file rook is written O-O. An x marks a capture, a + marks check and a # marks checkmate. So Qxe5+ is the queen capturing on e5 and giving check.

Where the rules 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 into Spain. But that version was slow. The piece beside the king went one square diagonally at a time, and a game could take a whole evening.

Around 1475, in Valencia in Spain, players let that piece slide any number of squares in any direction, and it became the queen. The bishop got its long diagonal at about the same time. Games that had taken an evening started ending in an hour, and that is the version in front of you today.

In 1886 Wilhelm Steinitz beat Johannes Zukertort in a match for the title, and that made him the first world champion. FIDE, the international federation founded in Paris in 1924, has run the title and the official rules ever since. The champion today is Gukesh Dommaraju of India, who took the title in 2024 at eighteen.

What a rating means

Gukesh sits at the top of one scale, and you go onto the same scale the moment you start playing. Sit down against somebody far stronger and neither of you gets a game. Every chess site and federation fixes that with a rating, a single number for how strong you are. The system came from Arpad Elo, a physics professor, in the 1960s. Beat somebody rated above you and your number jumps, but lose to a weaker player and it drops as hard.

A gap of 200 rating points means the stronger player is expected to score about three points out of four. You will start somewhere in the few hundreds, and the best alive sit past 2800. The grandmaster title needs 2500. Yours takes an afternoon of games to settle, and any site then pairs you with someone near your own strength.

Playing your first game

So what do you actually do tonight?

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 you lost a piece for nothing, since most beginner games 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.

That last one is the first real skill in chess, and it takes about two minutes to learn. Put a lone black king anywhere, add your king and a rook, and walk the black king to the edge with the rook taking away one rank at a time. When it reaches the edge, one rook check along that last rank leaves it nowhere to step, and that position is checkmate. You can do that tonight, on a kitchen table or on a screen, with no opponent.