What chess is, and how a game is won

Chess is a game for two people on a board of 64 squares. You take one color and your opponent takes the other, White moves first, and then you take turns, one move each. Both sides start with the same pieces and nothing is hidden, so a game you lose was lost to your own moves and never to luck.

You win by attacking your opponent's king in a way that cannot be answered, and that ending is called checkmate. Every other rule serves that, or stops your opponent getting there first.

The moves take about half an hour to learn, which raises the real question. Could you sit down tonight and play a real game against a stranger? You could, and the first thing in the way is the board, because the rules are written in the names of its squares.

The board

The board goes between you, and it has a right way round. Each of you should see a light square in the corner at your right hand. Players remember the check as light on the right.

That corner has a name, and so does every other square. 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 that light corner at White's right hand is h1.

Your pieces stand on the two ranks 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 rank in front. Black sets up the same way, so the two sides mirror each other.

How the pieces move

Six kinds of piece stand on those two ranks. Learning what each one does is most of the half hour. Any of them 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 file or its rank 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 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, and it is the only piece that jumps over whatever stands in the way. The king moves one square in any direction, though never onto a square an enemy piece attacks.

The pawn is the odd one, and it catches beginners out. It moves straight forward one square, or two on its first move, and it can never go backwards. But it does not capture the way it moves. A pawn captures one square diagonally forward, so two pawns nose to nose block each other.

When you swap pieces you need to know what you traded away, so players price them in points. A pawn is worth one point, a knight or a bishop three, a rook five, and the queen nine. The king has no points, because you never trade it and the game ends with it.

Check, checkmate and stalemate

Nobody ever captures a king and lifts it off the board, because the game stops one step short of that, and that step is where beginners go wrong. 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. 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 nothing of yours can get into the line. The game stops there, and whoever gave the checkmate has won.

Stalemate looks almost the same but pays out completely differently. It happens when the player to move has no legal move and is not in check. The result 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 thrown the win away.

The three moves that break the pattern

Those endings all come out of the plain piece moves, but three rules do not, and each will surprise you the first time it is played against you.

Castling moves two of your pieces in one turn. Your king slides two squares toward one of your rooks, and that rook jumps over it onto the square the king crossed. That leaves the king 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.

En passant is a pawn capture with a delay in it. A pawn's two-square opening can run it straight past an enemy pawn waiting to capture it, but this rule cancels the escape. If a black pawn on d7 runs to d5 and lands beside your pawn on e5, you may capture it as though it had stopped on d6, which is where your pawn lands. You get that one turn, and then the chance is gone.

Promotion is the one that decides games. A pawn that reaches the far rank stops being a pawn at once, and you exchange it 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

For all that, experienced players hardly ever reach checkmate. A player who can see it coming resigns, which means giving up before the finish is played out, and above beginner level that is the ordinary ending.

A draw ends the game with half a point each, and stalemate is one of the five ways to get there. The simplest of the other four is agreement, where you offer a draw and your opponent takes it. The next two are claims. 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.

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, which players call losing on time. But if the player with time left cannot possibly give checkmate, the game is a draw instead.

Each amount of time has a name. Bullet gives each player one minute, blitz gives three or five minutes, rapid gives ten minutes 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, and the work in each is different. The opening is roughly the first ten or fifteen moves, and both sides use them to push a pawn into the middle, bring out the knights and bishops, 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, and it settles most games. Attacks get built, pieces get traded, and 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 pieces left your king stops hiding and joins in as an attacker, and one extra pawn often wins, because it can march to the far rank and turn into a queen. That is the same promotion rule, and here it decides the game.

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 at some point, and from there you are on your own.

Reading a written move

Whatever you work out gets written down as you play, in a code that fits a whole game on one page. 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. An x marks a capture, a + marks check and a # marks checkmate, so Qxe5+ is the queen capturing on e5 and giving check. 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. But that version was slow, because the piece beside the king went one square diagonally and no further, so a game could take a whole evening.

Around 1475, in Valencia in Spain, players gave that piece the run of the board and turned it into 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.

Organised competition came much later. Wilhelm Steinitz, an Austrian player who treated chess as a set of principles, beat Johannes Zukertort, the other leading player of the day, in an 1886 match billed as a contest for the world 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. Every chess site and federation gives you a rating, a single number for how strong you are. The system came from Arpad Elo, a physics professor who built it for American chess in the 1960s. Beat somebody rated above you and your number jumps, but lose to a weaker player and it drops as hard.

The number is there to tell you what to expect before a game starts. A gap of 200 rating points means the stronger player is expected to score about three points out of four, so a game that far apart was never a fair fight. Ratings run from a few hundred for a beginner past 2800 for the best players alive. The grandmaster title needs a rating over 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 pick up. 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 with nowhere left to step, that position is checkmate. You can do that tonight, on a kitchen table or on a screen, with no opponent. Every plan in a full game is working toward it.