The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to chess:
Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard with 32 pieces.
Descriptions of chess Chess can be described as all of the following: Form of entertainment – form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience, or gives pleasure and delight. Form of recreation – activity of leisure, leisure being discretionary time. Form of play – voluntary, intrinsically motivated activity normally associated with recreational pleasure and enjoyment.Garvey, C. (1990). Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Game – structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Board game – game in which counters or pieces are placed, removed, or moved on a pre-marked surface or "board" according to a set of rules. Strategy game – Game in which the players' decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome. Two-player game – game played by just two players, usually against each other. Sport – form of play, but sport is also a category of entertainment in its own right (see immediately below for description) Sport – Competitive, entertaining, and skillful activity. It has rules and a winner can be decided by objective means.Recognized Sports of the International Olympic Committee International Olympic Committee official website. Retrieved 2 May 2008. Mind sport – game where the outcome is determined mainly by mental skill, rather than by pure chance.
Chess equipment
Essential equipment
Chess set – Equipment required to play a game of chess, they come in various materials and styles. Chessboard – Board with 64 squares arranged in two alternating colors. – horizontal row of squares on the chessboard. – vertical (i.e. in the direction from one player to the other) column of squares on the chessboard. 32 chess pieces in two colors, referred to as "white" and "black". 2 kings 2 queens – Some chess sets have 2 queens of each color, to deal with promotions. 4 rooks 4 bishops 4 knights 16 pawns
Specialized equipment
Chess clock – Dual timer used to monitor each player's thinking time. Used for speed chess, and to regulate time in tournament games. Chess table – Table built with features to make it useful for playing chess, most are made of wood. and writing implement – Tournament games require scores to be kept, and many players like to record other games for later analysis.
Rules of chess
Initial set up – initial placement of the pieces on the chessboard before any moves are made. Cheating in chess – methods that have been used to gain an unfair advantage by breaking the rules.
Moves White and Black in chess – one player is designated "white", the other is designated "black", white moves first. – move of a piece to a square occupied by an opposing piece, which is removed from the board and from play. Check – situation in which the king would be subject to capture (but the king is never actually captured). Checkmate – a move that makes capture of the opposing king inevitable. The player making the move wins the game
Piece-specific moves Moving a pawn – pawns move straight forward one space at a time, but capture diagonally (within a one-square range). On its first move, a pawn may move two squares forward instead (with no capturing allowed in a two-square move). Also, pawns are subject to the en passant and promotion movement rules (see below). En passant – on the very next move after a player moves a pawn two squares forward from its starting position, an opposing pawn that is guarding the skipped square may capture the pawn (taking it "as it passes"), by moving to the passed square as if the pawn had stopped there.FIDE rules (En Passant is rule 3.7, part d) If this is not done on the very next move, the right to do so is lost. Pawn promotion – when a pawn reaches its eighth rank it is exchanged for the player's choice of a queen, rook, bishop or knight (usually a queen, since it is the most powerful piece). Moving a knight – knights move two squares horizontally and one square vertically from their original position, or two squares vertically and one square horizontally, jumping directly to the destination while ignoring any pieces in the intervening spaces. Moving a bishop – bishops move any distance in a diagonal line in any direction. One bishop in each army moves diagonally on white squares only, and the other bishop is restricted to moving along black squares. Moving a rook – rooks may move any distance along a rank or a file (forward, backward, left, or right), and can also be used for castling (see below). Moving the queen – queens can move like a rook or like a bishop (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally), but no castling. Moving the king – kings may move one square in any direction, but may not move into check. It may also make a special move called "castling". Castling – special move available to each player once in the game (with restrictions, see below) where the king is moved two squares to the left or right and the rook on that side is moved to the other side of the king. Requirements for castling – Castling is legal if the following conditions are all met: 1. Neither the king nor the rook involved have previously moved. 2. There are no pieces in between the king and chosen rook. 3. The king is not currently in check. (For clarification, the involved rook may be currently under attack. Additionally, the king may have previously been in check, as long as the king did not move to resolve it.) 4. The king does not pass through a square that is under attack by an enemy piece. (For clarification, the rook may pass through a square that is under attack by an enemy piece; the only such square is the one adjacent to the rook when castling queenside, b1 for White and b8 for Black.) 5. The king does not end in a square that is under attack by an enemy piece.
End of the game Resigning – a player may end the game by resigning, which cedes victory to the opponent. Above beginner level it is usually considered good etiquette to resign in a hopeless position. Checkmate – object of the game – a king is in check and has no move to get out of check, losing the game. Draw – neither side wins or loses. In competition this usually counts as a half-win for each player. Draw by agreement – players may agree that the game is a draw. Stalemate – if the player whose turn it is to move has no legal move and is not in check, the game is a draw by stalemate. Fifty-move rule – if within the last fifty moves by both sides, no pawn has moved and there have been no captures, a player may claim a draw. (And the arbiter must stop the game after 75 moves, which is still a draw, the only difference being that this is forced, and it's not by agreement of players like the fifty-move-rule.) Threefold repetition – if the same position has occurred three times with the same player to move, a player may claim a draw. Perpetual check – situation in which one king cannot escape an endless series of checks but cannot be checkmated. This was formerly a rule of chess to result in a draw, and still used informally, but superseded by the threefold repetition rule and fifty-move rule, which make it implicit. Abandonment — In very rare cases, the player leaves the board on their move. While under the rules of the game the opponent must wait for the abandoned player's clock to flag, this is usually an automatic win. This is most common in online chess platforms.
Competition rules and other features Adjournment – play stops, and the game is resumed later. This has become rare since the advent of computer analysis of chess games. Chess notation – system of recording chess moves. Algebraic chess notation – standard method of recording moves, required for use in competition. Descriptive chess notation – obsolete method of recording moves, it was widely used, especially in English- and Spanish-speaking countries until about 1980. Forsyth–Edwards Notation (FEN) – standard method for recording chess positions, an alternative to chess diagrams. Time control – each player must complete either a specified number of moves or all of his moves before a certain time elapses on his clock. Touch-move rule – if a player touches his own piece, he must move it if it has a legal move. If he touches an opponent's piece, he must capture it if he can legally.
Minor variants Blindfold chess – one or both players play without seeing the board and pieces. Chess handicap – one of the players gives a handicap to the other player, usually starting the game without a certain piece. Fast chess – chess played with a time control limiting each player to a specified time of 60 minutes or less (can be as low as 1 minute).
Gameplay
Blunder – very bad move. Candidate move – move that upon initial observation of the position, warrants further analysis. Spotting these moves is the key to higher-level play. Compensation – having positional advantages in spite of disadvantages. Chess handicap – Way to enable a weaker player to have a chance of winning against a stronger one. Chess piece relative value – relative value of chess pieces, based on their relative power. Premove – used in fast online games, it refers to a player making his next move while his opponent is thinking about his move. After the opponent's move, the premove will be made, if legal, taking either no time at all, or only taking 0.1 seconds on the game clock. Priyome – typical maneuver or technique in chess. Ply – half-turn, that is, one player's portion of a turn. Tempo – a "unit" similar to time, equal to one chess move, e.g. to lose a tempo is to waste a move or give the opponent the opportunity of an extra move. Sometimes a player may want to lose a tempo.
General situations En prise – when an unguarded piece is in position to be captured. Initiative – situational advantage in which a player can make threats that cannot be ignored, forcing the opponent to use his turns to respond to threats rather than make his own. Transposition – sequence of moves resulting in a position which may also be reached by another common sequence of moves. Transpositions are particularly common in openings, where a given position may be reached by different sequences of moves. Players sometimes use transpositions deliberately in order to avoid variations they dislike, lure opponents into unfamiliar or uncomfortable territory or simply to worry opponents. See review at Time trouble – having little thinking time left in a timed game, thereby increasing the likelihood of making weak or losing moves or overlooking strong or winning moves. Zugzwang – German for "move obligation" or "forced move", a situation in which a player would prefer to pass and make no move, because he has no move that does not worsen his position, but move he must!
Pawn structure
Backward pawn – pawn that is not supported by other pawns and cannot advance. Connected pawns – pawns of the same color on adjacent files so that they can protect each other. Doubled pawns – two pawns of the same color on the same file, so that one blocks the other. Half-open file – file that has pawns of one color only. Isolated pawn – pawn with no pawns of the same color on adjacent files. Maróczy Bind – formation with white pawns on c4 and e4, after the exchange of White's d-pawn for Black's c-pawn. Open file – file void of pawns. Passed pawn – pawn that can advance to its eighth rank without being blocked by an opposing pawn and without the possibility of being captured by a pawn on an adjacent file.
Chess tactics
Anti-computer tactics – tactics used by humans in games against computers that the program cannot handle very well