Tag: chess rules

CategoriesChess For Beginners

Chess Noob #5 – Check, Checkmate, Stalemate

Posted on June 15, 2012by regencyadmin

Now that you know how the pieces move (at least, you do if you read the last 2 blogs… if you haven’t read them, please go back and do so now), you need to learn how to win!  There are two ways to win: 1) get your opponent in checkmate, 2) your opponent realizes it’s futile for him/her to continue and simply resigns.  Be careful though, as your opponent could try to force a draw from a stalemate.

So what do “check”, “checkmate” and “stalemate” mean, and what are the differences?  Well I’m glad you asked!  Let’s start with the one that’s not a game-ender…

CHECK

In “All About Pieces (part 1)” I made the comment that the King is worth so many points you can actually potentially win the game just by threatening to capture him.  Well, that’s if the threat is so powerful there’s nothing the opponent can do.  If the opponent CAN stop the threat, the threat is simply called Check.

Check is when a piece is placed in a position where it threatens to capture the King on its next move, BUT the side being threatened is able to put a stop to the threat.  Let’s look at a couple examples.  (Please forgive the numbers and letters not being as neat as they should be.  My chess software doesn’t have the board labeled, so I have to do it myself in MSPaint).

In this position, the black bishop has the white king in Check- it is threatening to capture the King on it’s next move.  Black does not win, however, because White can easily block the check by pushing his c-Pawn (the pawn in front of his queen-side bishop), or by moving his Knight to c3.

There are 3 ways to get out of Check.  1) intercept- this is the example I just used, where you put something in the way of the check. 2) capture the attacking piece. 3) move the King out of Check.  Here’s one more example of a check, which the threatened side has the choice of doing all 3 options:

The white Bishop has the black King in Check.  Black has numerous options here.  He can capture the white bishop with his h-Pawn, he can block the Bishop’s path with either one of his Knights, he can block with his light-squared Bishop, he can block with his Queen, or he can simply move the King out of the way at D2.

So what’s the difference between Check and Checkmate?

CHECKMATE

Checkmate is when you put your opponent in Check (threatening the King), and there is nothing they can do to stop it! For instance

In this position, the white Queen has the black King in Checkmate.  Why?  Well, the King is obviously in Check because the Queen threatens to capture the King on her next move.  With the Queen so close to the King, there aren’t any spaces for any piece to intercept. There are no pieces that can take the Queen (do you see that if the King captures the Queen, white’s Bishop will then capture the King?), and anywhere the King tries to flee to, the Queen will capture him.  The Queen threatens the King and there’s nothing black can do to stop it, black is therefore in Checkmate, and has lost the game.

So then, what’s the difference between Checkmate and Stalemate?

STALEMATE

A Stalemate is a draw.  It’s where one side is NOT in check, but anything he does will cause him to BE in Check.  Let’s look at an example.

In this diagram, it’s currently black’s move.  He is in Stalemate.  Sure, it looks like white wins because he has a King and a Queen left where as black has only his King.  But, like I said, it’s black’s move… and he can’t go anywhere!  In his current position, the black King is NOT in check!  However, anywhere he moves, he would be placing himself in check (he’d get taken by the Queen at d1, d2, c2 and b1; he’d get taken by the white King at c2 and b2).  This is therefore a Stalemate and counts as a draw!

Let’s end this blog with a little Quiz.  Below are 5 positions.  See if you can figure out if each position is a Check, Checkmate, or Stalemate.  I’ll post the answers in the next blog, where we’ll talk more in depth about that special move I told you about once before: Castling.

1 

  2  

3  

4 

5


CategoriesChess For Beginners

Chess Noob #3- All About Pieces (Part 1)

Posted on June 3, 2012by regencyadmin

In order to become a good chess player (or even just a chess player who knows what they’re doing), you need to know what the pieces are, how they move, what they can and can’t do, and how many points they’re worth

Each player has the same pieces and the same number of each piece to start with.  Each player begins the game with 8 Pawns, 2 Rooks, 2 Knights, 2 Bishops, 1 King and 1 Queen.  Each piece moves in a special way and each is worth a point value (used to figure out if you’re winning or losing at any point in the game, not counting positional advantages).  It’s a lot of information, so to make it more manageable, I’ve split it into 2 parts.  Part 1 deals with the King, Queen and Rook, while part 2 deals with the minor pieces and Pawns.

I’m going to start with the King.  Most chess instructors will begin a lesson on pieces with the Pawn because it’s worth the least amount of points.  However, the Pawn is perhaps the trickiest piece to use for someone just learning how to play.  I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed with the first piece, so we’ll save the Pawn for last and start with the piece that has the least moving power…

The King

The King is the most valuable piece on the board.  He is worth an infinite amount of points if you capture him.  Infact, he is SO valuable, that you can actually win the game just by THREATENING to capture the king, but we’ll get to that in the next blog.  Right now, you need to know 2 things about the king: how he moves and how many points he’s worth.  As stated, the king is worth infinity points! Pretty cool, huh?  To make up for his incredible point value, though, he is the piece with the least amount of movement.  He is able to move in any direction he wants, but only one space at a time.  There is one exception to this called “castling”, which we’ll get into shortly.  To illustrate the his usual movement, here is a picture of a king on the board.  The black dots indicate what spaces the King can move to from the square he’s currently on:

The next valuable piece is the other member of the royal family.

The Queen

The Queen is worth 9 points (not nearly as high as infinity, but still much higher than any other piece on the board). In many cases, capturing the Queen will give you a much more sure victory over your opponent!  However, the Queen is very hard to catch.  Like the King, she’s able to move in any direction she wants. The reason she’s so hard to capture, though, is that she can move as many spaces as she wants (as long as she doesn’t have to go through any other pieces… only the Knight is capable of such a maneuver)!  The diagram below shows the queen in a spot on the board, and all the spaces she can move to in one turn.

The next piece we’ll look at are the palace walls themselves…

The Rook

You begin the game with 2 Rooks, each one worth 5 points.  Rooks are able to move horizontally or vertically (your choice) as many spaces as they want (again, as long as they don’t have to go through another piece).  Here’s an illustration to show it’s movement potential.

Remember that move I mentioned called “Castling”?  It involves the King and the Rook.  Castling is a way of protecting the King.  It may be done by each opponent only once.  You may castle to either the King side or the Queen side.  When you castle, you will move the King TWO spaces toward the Rook, and then put the Rook immediately to the other side of the King.  It will look like this (the animation demonstrates for both white and black how to castle on the king side and how to castle on the queenside):

I will likely go into more detail of castling (when to do it, when not to do it, how to do it, how not to do it, and why you’d want to do it at all) in a future blog.  But for now, you just need to know what the move is… the King goes 2 spaces toward the Rook, the Rook goes on the other side of the King.

In Part 2 of this lesson, we’ll talk about the “minor pieces” (Bishops and Knights) and Pawns.


CategoriesChess For Beginners

Chess Noob #1 – An Introduction to a New Blog Series

Posted on May 25, 2012by regencyadmin

Greetings to all my fellow chess players and a big warm “hello” to all the would-be/future chess players of the world who’ve come across this blog.  This will be a new chess blog series titled “Chess Noob”, and it will be geared primarily to beginning/novice players (both adults and children and possibly even parents of new chess players).

So what will a chess blog for novice players entail?  “Chess Noob” will start out simple (the rules of the game, how to play, etc.) and work through everything you need to know to learn the game of chess or (if you already play) how to get better.

WARNING: This blog is not at all geared for intermediate or advanced players, so if you fit in one of those categories you may be very bored…  However, since we’ll be working our way up we may eventually get into the intermediate work.

My goal with this blog is to get someone from the point of going “what’s chess?” to having them play at a level that they can do well in chess tournaments (although this blog alone won’t get you there, you’ll need to actually practice playing as well!)  I won’t be turning anyone into a world champion with these blogs (as I’m nowhere near that advanced myself), but together we’ll coach you into someone that can, at the very least, beat all your friends (unless you’re friends with the Polgar sisters… then you’re on your own!)

I’ll be taking you through everything (literally) from the start.  The first blog after this you see will be to tell you what the game actually is and it’s rules.  After that we’ll talk about the pieces and how they move, a few openings, tactics (starting off simplistic and increasing in difficulty as we go), what to expect at chess tournaments, how ratings work and what they mean, how to help your chess-playing child improve their game while still having fun, and more topics (to be honest, I only know my plans for the first 10 or 12 topics so far… after that I’m going to just wing it).

So please, I invite you, bookmark this blog so you can come back every week to see what’s new to learn and let’s grow together as chess players.  And if there are any topics you want me to cover, feel free to leave a comment telling me!

Have a topic you’d like me to cover or a question you’d like to ask? send me an e-mail at [email protected]

CategoriesChess For Beginners

Basic Checkmates

Posted on May 21, 2012by regencyadmin

As a beginner it’s important to learn which material imbalances lead to a clear win. In this post I’m going to show two very basic checkmates that every beginning chess player should know. The first is checkmating a lone enemy king with your own king and queen. The first concept to understand is that you cannot checkmate the enemy king in the middle of the board. The king must be driven to the edge of the board. The way you do this is by using your queen to cut off escape squares. Take a look at the graphic below:

In the above diagram, white has two moves that will lock the enemy king on the edge of the board. Do you see what they are? They are Qg7 and Qb7. In this case however Qg7 is superior, can you see why? Once the enemy king is driven to the edge of the board it’s a simple matter of moving your own king to support your queen as she gives checkmate. The final position usually looks like this:

 

Notice how the king is supporting the queen while she is delivering checkmate.

The second basic checkmate a beginner should learn is checkmating a lone king with a king and rook. This checkmate is a little bit harder because it requires the use of temporizing moves. Once again the king must driven to the edge of the board. Let’s take a look at the diagram below where it’s white turns to move:

Notice how if it were black turns to move and our opponent played Ke8 we could play Ra8#. It is however our turn to move. If we play an immediate Kf6 black will escape via Ke8. The key in this position is to make a waiting move. Either Rb7 or Rc7 work fine. Then if black plays Ke8 we checkmate by either Rb8 or Rc8. More likely black will play Kg8, and then the winning sequence is:

1. Rc7 Kg8

2. Kf6 Kh8

3. Kg6 Kg8

4. Rc8#

The final position is in the diagram below.

Although these positions are basic for most chess players, do not underestimate their importance. A good way to practice is to set up the position against a computer and keep practicing until you win every time. Good luck!