How to Play Chess

Daniel Cattoor

TECM 2700-020

Table of Contents iii

Table of Contents Table of Contents ..................................................................................................... iii

Introduction ................................................................................................................ v

Chapter 1: Board Setup and Rules ............................................................................. 3

Chapter 1: Board Setup and Rules ............................................................................. 4

Materials Needed .................................................................................................... 4

Rules and Setup....................................................................................................... 5

Chapter 2: How the Pieces Move and Special Move Rules ...................................... 7

Chapter 2: How the Pieces Move and Special Move Rules ...................................... 9

How the Pieces Move ............................................................................................. 9

King ......................................................................................................................... 9

Queen ....................................................................................................................10

Rook ......................................................................................................................10

Bishop ...................................................................................................................11

Knight ...................................................................................................................11

Pawn ......................................................................................................................12

Special Moves .......................................................................................................12

Chapter 3: How to Win ............................................................................................15

Chapter 3: How to Win ............................................................................................17

Checkmate .............................................................................................................17

Stalemate ...............................................................................................................17

Sources: ....................................................................................................................18

Index .........................................................................................................................19

Introduction v

Introduction

Have you ever been interested in playing a great board game that has stood the test of time with origins of similar chess-like games dating back more than two thousand years ago from India? The game of chess we know and play today has been around for about 500 years where it originally popularized out of Europe. This is a great game to play if you are interested in exercising your brain or just to have fun to play against a friend or family member. In this guide, you will learn the basics of how to set up the board for play, and the rules involved in playing. In addition, you will learn how to move each piece across the board, as well as special moves and promotions pieces can perform. Finally, the most important part you will learn is the ways to win the game.

Chapter 1 3

Chapter 1: Board Setup and Rules

In this chapter, you will learn how to set up the board for a game of chess, and the rules for playing.

4 How to Play Chess

Chapter 1: Board Setup and Rules

Materials Needed The materials you need to play a game of chess are very simple, to play a game you will need:

• Chess Board • 16 chess pieces for each player, 32 total • An opponent

Chapter 1 5

Rules and Setup Step 1: The first thing to do when you start a game of chess is to make sure the white square is on the bottom right-hand side for each player.

Step 2: Looking at the image above again, you will set up the pieces on the board the same way each time. There are 16 total pieces for each player on the board to start, consisting of 8 pawns, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, one queen, and one king. Pawns start on the second row, the rooks go in the corners of row one, followed by the knights and then bishops, and the queen in between the bishops always holding her color (white queen on white square, black queen on black square), and finally the king is placed on the remaining spot beside the queen.

Step 3: The first player to move will always be the one in possession of the white pieces; to decide who moves first, players can use two common options. The first is a coin flip to decide who will play the white pieces, alternatively you can have one player guess the color of a piece held in the other players’ hand to decide who plays on white.

Step 4: After deciding which color each player is, white will make one move, followed by black making one move. This process will continue until the game ends.

Chapter 2: How the Pieces Move and Special Move Rules

In this chapter, you will learn how each of the 6 pieces move, and the special moves that some of them are able to perform.

Chapter 2 9

Chapter 2: How the Pieces Move and Special Move Rules

How the Pieces Move All 6 pieces move in different ways from one another, a piece cannot move through another (with exception of the knight which can jump over pieces), and can never move onto a space one of their own pieces already controls. However, a player can move their piece onto a square with the opponent’s piece in order to perform a capture, which removes that piece from the board. Let us begin with a detailed description of each piece and its movement, starting with the most important, the king.

King The king is the most important piece in the game, as well as being the weakest. The king can move one square in any direction, up, down, sideways, and diagonally. The player must work around the king and never move himself into check, and avoid capture.

10 How to Play Chess

Queen The queen is the most powerful piece on the board, her movement is similar to the king’s, she can move in any direction, up, down, sideways, and diagonally. The difference between the two is that she can move the entire length of the board so long as she does not move through any of her own pieces.

Rook The rook is another piece that can move the entire distance of the board, but only going up, down, left, or right. As with the queen, the same rule applies to the rook, it may move the entire distance of the board as long as it does not collide with any of its own pieces. This piece can be very powerful if you can manage to keep both rooks in the game for a long time working together.

Chapter 2 11

Bishop Along the same lines as the queen and rook, the bishop can also move the entire distance of the board, but only diagonally. This bishop is a unique piece because its starting square color also determines how it moves, one bishop starts on white, and the other will start on black. These bishops must always stay on their starting colors, because of this; they also can be powerful pieces if used together.

Knight As mentioned previously, the knight is the only piece on the board that can “jump” over other pieces, behaving differently than any other on the board. The easy way to remember how a knight move is to remember that he moves in an “L” shape, and the L can go in any direction, he moves two spaces in one direction, followed by a 90 degree turn to another. When the knight jumps over a piece he doesn’t capture it, the behavior is still essentially the same, the knight will only capture pieces where it lands.

12 How to Play Chess

Pawn Despite being the least valuable piece on the board, the pawn is unique in that it moves in one direction, and captures pieces in another. The pawn can only move one space forward at a time, and when capturing a piece it will take one diagonally in front of it to move forward. In addition to these, on every pawns very first move, it has the choice to move forward two spaces instead of the normal one, this is only for the pawn’s first move of the game.

Special Moves On top of the other quirks mentioned about the pawn, they still have a couple more. The first is “Promotion,” this is simply when a pawn makes it to the end of the board, and the player can then promote it into a queen, rook, bishop, or knight as they desire.

Chapter 2 13

One final move a pawn can perform is “En passant” which is the French term for “in passing.” Since this move is more complicated, the picture above will help explain. When a pawn moves out two squares on its first move and lands side by side to the opponent’s pawn, which basically avoids a normal capture since he moved up two, the opponent has a choice on their very next turn to capture the pawn that moved up two. Despite the pawn not actually being in that spot the opponent “captured” in, if it had only moved one space that is where the capture would have occurred in the first place.

14 How to Play Chess

The last widely known and used special move is “Castling.” This move occurs between the king and the rook, the goal in mind for this move is to keep the king safe, and another important thing it does is remove your rook from the corner square of the map. As seen in the picture above, the king moves over two spaces, which is the king side castle, and the rook flips over to the opposite side of the king out of the corner. The other castle is the queen side castle, in this instance, the king moves over two spaces once again, but the rook moves over three to get to the other side of the king. This move comes with a few rules in order to be able to use it properly, it must be the king’s and rook’s very first move in the game, there may be no pieces between the rook and king to perform the move, and most importantly, the king cannot pass through or be put into check during the castle.

Chapter 3: How to Win

In this chapter, you will learn how to win a game of chess, as well as a couple ways a game can end with no winner.

Chapter 3 17

Chapter 3: How to Win

Checkmate The way to win a game of chess is to do what is putting your opponent into “checkmate.” By putting your opponent’s king into checkmate, this means you have put the king into check, and there is no possibly way for the kin to get out of check. “Check” is where your opponent moves into a position that puts your king in danger of capture on a next turn. There are a few ways of getting your king out of check to keep the game going. The first way to avoid check is to simply move the king out of harm’s way and avoid capture, and alternatively, you can move one of your own pieces to block the pathway to your king to keep it safe (this does not work against knights as they jump over pieces as mentioned previously). The final way is to capture the opponent’s piece that is threatening your king.

Stalemate Stalemate is another way a game of chess can end, and in this situation, no one wins the game. There are a couple ways a stalemate can happen, the first and most common is where one player has a king not in check, but cannot make any legal move. Another type of stalemate is when one player only has a king left, and the opponent still has some pieces up, a bishop and king for example, in this case, a king can avoid checkmate indefinitely as there are not enough pieces on the board to successfully capture him and the game is considered a draw. The final most common type of stalemate is where a player has a king and repeats the exact same move three times in a row, after this occurs the game is a draw as well.

18 How to Play Chess

Sources: Introduction and Fly Chapter picture –

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chess_in_black_-wmark.jpg

Chess Board layout –

http://chessworldin.blogspot.com/2011/03/chess-starting-position.html

Individual pieces movement –

http://www.chessvariants.org/d.chess/chess.html

En passant –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant

Castling –

http://en.chessok.net/rules_of_chess.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chess_in_black_-wmark.jpghttp://chessworldin.blogspot.com/2011/03/chess-starting-position.htmlhttp://www.chessvariants.org/d.chess/chess.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passanthttp://en.chessok.net/rules_of_chess.html

Index 19

Index bishop, 11, 12, 17 checkmate, 17 king, 5, 9, 10, 14, 17 knight, 9, 11, 12

pawn, 12, 13 queen, 5, 10, 11, 12, 14 rook, 10, 11, 12, 14

Table of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1: Board Setup and RulesChapter 1: Board Setup and RulesMaterials NeededRules and Setup

Chapter 2: How the Pieces Move and Special Move RulesChapter 2: How the Pieces Move and Special Move RulesHow the Pieces MoveKingQueenRookBishopKnightPawnSpecial Moves

Chapter 3: How to WinChapter 3: How to WinCheckmateStalemate

Sources:Index