Basic Movements of Chess Piece

Basic Movement:

Each chess piece has its own style of moving. Moves are made to vacant squares except when capturing an opponent’s piece. In the chess game except the knight, pieces can’t jump over any other piece. When a piece is captured, the attacking piece replaces the opponent piece on its square, and the captured piece is removed from the game. The King can be checkmate but it cant be captured by any other piece.

1) KING : The king moves one square in any direction, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. There is one special type of move, made by a king and rook simultaneously, called castling.

2) QUEEN : The queen has the combined moves of the rook and the bishop, i.e., the queen may move in any straight line, horizontal, vertical, or diagonal.

3) KNIGHT : The knight moves to the nearest square not on the same rank, file, or diagonal. In other words, the knight moves two squares like the rook and then one square perpendicular to that. Its move is not blocked by other pieces, i.e. it leaps to the new square. The knight moves in an “L” or “7” shape (or either shape inverted) with two steps one direction, a 90° turn, and one step in the new direction.

4) BISHOP : The bishop moves any number of vacant squares in any diagonal direction.

5) ROOK : The rook moves any number of vacant squares vertically or horizontally. It can also be moved while castling.

6) PAWNS : Pawns has the most complex rules of movement. A pawn can move forward one square only if that square is unoccupied. If it has not yet moved, the pawn has the option of moving two squares forward provided both squares in front of the pawn are unoccupied. A pawn cannot move backward. Pawns are the only pieces that capture differently from how they move. They can capture an enemy piece on either of the two spaces adjacent to the space in front of them (i.e., the two squares diagonally in front of them) but cannot move to these spaces if they are vacant.

If the pawn reaches to its eighth rank, then it can be promoted or converted to a queen, rook, bishop, or knight of the same color, choice being taken as per the player’s wish. There is a possibility of promoting all the 10 pawns to a ten queen, hooks, bishops or knights.

Castling : Castling consists of moving the king two squares towards a rook, then placing the rook on the other side of the king, adjacent to it. It can be permitted when it satisfies all the following rules:

1) King and rook which will be involved in castling must not have moved previously.

2) There must be no piece in between the rook and the king.

3) The king may not currently be in check, nor may the king pass through or end up in a square that is under attack by an enemy piece.

4) King and the rook must be in the same rank.

ABC Of Chess

Chess is an interesting game played by two players, and it can also played online in which the computer will be your opponent. While playing manually, one player plays with the white piece and the other player play with the black pieces. Both players have equal pieces in the beginning: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. It will be arranged as shown in the following diagram :

Chess game is played on a square shaped chessboard, consisting of 64 squares of alternating black and white color. Alternately, players make a move starting with white piece. In this game, each piece will move on its own distinct way. The goal of this game is “Checkmate” i.e to threaten the opponents king, This one of the ways to end the game but there can be a possibility of a draw or resign. While moving a piece to the destination square, it can be either empty or captured by the opponent. Captured piece can be then removed by the board and there wont be any chances of entering the same piece into the same game.

If there cant be any possible move for any of the piece (white or black) then the respective king is said to be checkmated. If Black is not in check and has no legal moves, it is stated as Stalemate if it occurs then the game ends in a draw.

Many new chess variants have come up nowadays.  Some of the most popular chess games include Avalanche Chess, Bughouse, Chess with Different Armies, Extinction Chess, Fischer Random Chess, Grand Chess, Hostage Chess and more such varieties.