How to Play Chess
Set out sixty-four squares with a light square on each player's right, rooks in the corners and the queen on her own colour. White moves first and the players alternate. Each piece has its own way of moving, no move may leave your own king under attack, and the game is won by checkmate — an attack on the king that cannot be answered. Everything else is detail.
The rules, step by step
- 1Set the board upEight ranks by eight files, with a light square in the right-hand corner nearest each player. Rooks on the corners, then knights, then bishops, then the queen on her own colour and the king beside her. Pawns fill the second rank.
- 2White moves first, then alternateOne move each, all the way to the end. There is no passing: if it is your turn you must make a legal move, and having none is either checkmate or stalemate.
- 3Move the pieces as they moveRooks along ranks and files, bishops along diagonals, the queen either way, the knight in an L and over anything in the way, the king one square at a time. Pawns go forward and capture diagonally.
- 4Never leave your own king attackedA move that would expose your king to capture is not a legal move, which is what makes a pinned piece unable to leave the line between the king and the attacker. If you are in check you must answer it at once.
- 5Castle once, if you still canMove the king two squares toward a rook that has not moved and slide that rook past it, provided the squares between are empty, the king is not in check, and it neither crosses nor lands on an attacked square.
- 6Take en passant while you canWhen an enemy pawn steps two squares and lands beside yours, you may capture it on the square it skipped — but only on your very next move. The pawn you take is not on the square you move to.
- 7Promote a pawn that reaches the endA pawn arriving on the last rank is replaced immediately by a queen, rook, bishop or knight of its own colour. It may not stay a pawn, and you may have more than one queen.
- 8Win by checkmate, or drawCheckmate ends the game at once. A draw follows from stalemate, from the same position appearing three times, from fifty moves each with no capture and no pawn move, or from neither side having enough material to mate.
Try it — the rules above, running
New game starts a fresh game at the level you last chose. Take back lifts your last move and the computer’s reply together, and Hint names a move and says why. The three-dot menu at the end of the bar holds the level, whether you play White or Black, and the board flip.
Moves so far
Nothing yet. Every move you play is written here in algebraic notation — the same notation every chess book uses.
Your statistics · Club · White
- Played
- 0
- Won
- 0
- Win rate
- 0%
- Streak
- 0
- Best streak
- 0
- Best time
- —
This level
Four plies, with a four-ply capture search on the end of each one so an exchange is counted to the last recapture instead of being cut off mid-trade. It punishes a hanging piece at once and finds most two-move tactics.
Keyboard
- Arrows
- Move between squares
- Enter / Space
- Select a piece, or play the move
- Escape
- Clear the selection
- U
- Take back
- H
- Hint
- B
- Flip the board
- N
- New game
- F
- Full screen
How do you set up a chess board?
- 1Get the board the right way roundTurn the board so that the square in the right-hand corner nearest you is light. Half of all badly set-up boards are just this, rotated ninety degrees.
- 2Put the rooks in the cornersThen the knights beside them, then the bishops beside those. That fills six of the eight squares on your back rank.
- 3Queen on her own colourThe white queen goes on the light square of the two remaining, the black queen on the dark one. The king takes the last square, and the two kings face each other down the same file.
- 4Pawns across the second rankEight of them, one in front of each piece. White's are on rank two, Black's on rank seven, and White moves first.
How does each chess piece move?
- Rook — any number of squares along a rank or a file, stopping at the first piece it meets. It captures that piece if it is an enemy.
- Bishop — the same, along diagonals. Each bishop stays on the colour it began on for the whole game, which is why a pair of them covers everything and a lone one covers half the board.
- Queen — a rook and a bishop at once, in all eight directions. On an empty board a queen in the centre has 27 moves and a queen in the corner has 21.
- Knight — two squares one way and one the other, and it is the only piece that jumps over anything in between. A knight in the centre of an empty board reaches 8 squares; one in the corner reaches 2.
- King — one square in any direction, plus castling. It may never move onto a square that is attacked, and the two kings can never stand next to each other.
- Pawn — one square forward, or two from its own starting rank, and it captures one square diagonally forward. It is the only piece that captures differently from how it moves, and the only one that cannot go backwards.
How do you castle, and when can you not?
Castling moves the king two squares towards a rook and jumps that rook to the square the king crossed. King-side the king goes from e1 to g1 and the rook from h1 to f1; queen-side the king goes from e1 to c1 and the rook from a1 to d1. It is the only move in chess that moves two pieces, and each side may do it at most once.
- Neither the king nor that rook may have moved. Moving the king loses both sides; moving one rook loses only its own.
- Every square between the king and the rook must be empty — two of them king-side, three of them queen-side.
- The king may not be in check when it starts.
- The king may not pass over an attacked square.
- The king may not land on an attacked square.
- The rook is allowed to pass over an attacked square, and queen-side the b-file square may be attacked. Only the king's own squares are tested.
What is algebraic notation?
Files are lettered a to h from White's left, ranks numbered 1 to 8 from White's side, so every square has a name: e4, g7, a1. A move is written as the piece's letter — K, Q, R, B, N for the knight, nothing at all for a pawn — followed by the square it lands on. Nf3 is a knight to f3. e4 is a pawn to e4. An x marks a capture, so Bxe5; a pawn capture names the file it came from, so exd5. Castling is O-O king-side and O-O-O queen-side, promotion is written e8=Q, check is + and checkmate is #.
When two identical pieces could both reach the square, the notation adds whichever of the file or the rank separates them — Nbd2 if the knights are on different files, N1d2 if they are on the same file but different ranks, and the whole square if neither is enough, which happens with three queens after promotion. The move list beside the board on this page is written exactly this way.
How can a game of chess end?
| Ending | What it means | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Checkmate | The king is attacked and no legal move ends the attack | The attacker wins |
| Stalemate | No legal move, and the king is not attacked | Draw |
| Threefold repetition | The same position, with the same rights, has occurred three times | Draw |
| Fifty-move rule | 100 half-moves with no capture and no pawn move | Draw |
| Insufficient material | Neither side has the pieces left to deliver mate | Draw |
Two of those have a detail worth knowing. Repetition counts the right to capture en passant, but only when the capture is really available — a double push that no enemy pawn can answer does not make an otherwise identical position a different one, and a program that compares raw board states gets this wrong in almost every game that opens with one. And checkmate outranks the fifty-move count: a mate delivered on the hundredth half-move is a mate, not a draw.
How do you win more often?
- Move a piece once in the opening, not twiceEvery move you spend moving the same knight again is a move your opponent spends bringing a new piece out, and you never get it back. The opening is not decided by which squares you chose so much as by how many moves each side spent not developing — which is also why the computer punishes an early queen sortie: you chase it, it develops.
- Castle early, usually by move tenA king left in the middle is on the file that opens first when pawns are traded, and it blocks your own rooks from connecting along the back rank. Castling solves both in one move, which is why it is the only move in chess that moves two pieces.
- Count the defenders before you takeBefore any capture, count how many pieces attack the square and how many defend it, and take the cheapest piece first. The computer at Club and Sharp looks at captures past the end of its main search precisely so it can count the whole exchange, and it will punish a capture you counted one deep.
- Look at your opponent's last move before your ownAsk what it attacks that it did not attack before. Most beginner losses are not deep tactics — they are a bishop that quietly started eyeing f7 two moves ago and was never looked at, and one question a move would have caught it.
- In the endgame, walk the king forwardWith the queens off, the king stops being a liability and becomes a strong piece, worth roughly a minor piece in fighting value. This engine's evaluation blends its king table towards the centre as material comes off, for exactly that reason — a king on e4 in a pawn endgame is often worth more than the pawn you spent getting it there.
- When you are ahead, trade pieces and not pawnsAn extra piece matters more the fewer pieces are left, and pawns are what you need to promote once the pieces are gone. Trade a bishop up to a rook up and the win gets easier; trade your last pawn off and a bishop up becomes nothing at all. King and one bishop against a bare king, or king and one knight against a bare king, is not a hard win — it is not a win, and this board ends it as a draw on the spot for insufficient material.
Common questions about chess
- What is the fastest possible checkmate?
- Two moves, and only against a player who helps. After 1.f3 e5 2.g4, the reply Qh4 is mate — the white king has no square, nothing can take the queen, and nothing can block the h4–e1 diagonal.
- Is the king allowed to capture?
- Yes, any adjacent enemy piece that is not defended. What it may not do is move onto a square attacked by anything, which includes standing next to the other king.
- Can a pawn move backwards?
- No. It is the only piece that cannot, which is why a pawn move is irreversible and why the fifty-move counter resets on every one of them.
- What does it mean when a piece is pinned?
- It is standing between your king and an enemy rook, bishop or queen. Moving it would leave your king attacked, so it has no legal move off that line at all — the rule does the work, not politeness.
- How do I read the move numbers?
- One number per pair of moves: 1.e4 e5 means White played e4 and Black replied e5, and both were move one. A half-move by one player is called a ply, which is what search depth is counted in.
Ready to stop reading? Play chess on the full board, with controls and statistics tailored to that game.