Three Good Chess Moves

Chess is a fun game and can be enjoyed by players of all skill levels due to its unique rating system. Here are three chess rules that any beginner should be aware of.

Whenever a player advances a pawn the length of the board and to his/her opponent’s back rank, the pawn can be promoted to any piece – usually the queen (the most powerful piece in the game). There is often confusion over this rule, because people are not aware that they are allowed to have one more queen at a time, but in reality, it is theoretically possibly (but very difficult) to have as many as nine queens at one time.

Another rule of chess that often confuses players is called the ‘en passant”, which is French for “in passing”. The en passant is a special pawn move that can only be used the first time a player advances a pawn, and only if that pawn advances two spaces, and if their opponent has a pawn on an adjacent square that could have taken the advancing pawn if that pawn had moved its usual one space. When doing the en passant, the player who was not able to take the advancing pawn, moves to the space that pawn would have been in if it had moved one space and the advancing pawn is removed from the board. The en passant is the only move in chess where a piece can be removed without a piece ending its turn on the space the removed piece was.

A third chess move is a great defensive move called “castling”. This can happen if a player has neither moved the king and one of his rooks during the game, and there are no pieces in-between them. When a player wants to castle, he moves his king two spaces toward the rook and then moves that rook to the first space on the other side of the king.