Hello, fellow hobbyist. My name is Maurice and I will be your teacher. Your personal teacher for chess improvement. But first you might be wondering what is chess? If you already know or don’t care for the history of chess then you can skip to: The Basics Of Chess by scrolling down.
It seems we do have a curios soul. Let me tell you of the start of chess. Chess is one of the oldest games there is, maybe not older than Go, but Go is a topic for another day.
Today I am purely talking about chess which started around the 6th century in India. Well isn’t that ironic? The birth place of chess gave the chess world one of best chess players of all time, Viswanathan Anand. He was a 5 time world chess champion, the Bobby Fisher of chess, without being insane.
Now the chess invented in India is not the same chess we play today. The original game was called Chaturanga, which would travel along the silk road and into Persia.
The rules of these games had similar ideas and concepts, but the rules were entirely different depending on the culture. Once it came to Europe that is the place where it would later become the modern chess we know and love today. The current form of chess we play today was created around the 16th century.
Now that you know a little bit of the history of the game of chess, we can now take a look at how to play the game.
The Basics Of Chess:
Let us start of with the most important chess piece: The king. As you scroll down to the picture below you will see a picture of the chess piece and arrows, showing you the squares the piece can move.
As you can see: the king can move anywhere in any direction it wants (as long as it is a legal move). One restriction is that the king can only move one square at a time, no this not checkers where you can jump over pieces to capture them.
Why is the king the most import, well that’s simple if your king gets captured then you lose the game. So it’s important to remember that you never want your king to checkmate, but mote on checkmates later.
The second most powerful piece is the Queen, she is your protector, the one that will keep your king safe. See below for her moves.
As you can see the queen can move in any direction just like the king, but unlike the king. The queen can move as far as she wants in any direction. As long as there is not any piece blocking her way.
The third most powerful piece is: the rook!! (shoutout to Gothamchess) The rook, also referred to as the castle is a very important. See below to look at the moves for this piece.
The rook/castle moves almost like a queens, except it can’t move diagonal like a queen can and there are two of them. Our next piece is the knight. The knight is a unique piece in that it is the only piece that can job over other pieces and the way it moves is unlike any other piece. I have provided an Example for you below.
Weird isn’t it? The
The
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The
How to set up:
The set up is the same for both sides. You can’t really mess up setting up the game, the only thing you have to keep in mind the
Special moves:
There are a few special moves that every chess player should know. The special moves only effect the
In this position it is whites turn to move and the King and rook on h1 can move at the same time, to preform one move/action. Scroll below to see what white can do.
This is all one move. The
In this example the
Pawn promotion:
If your
En Passant:
As I explained earlier a
Let’s say it’s white to move. White would really love to move it’s pawn forward twice and threaten blacks
Puzzle #1
Back to Play
Puzzle #2
White to play
Puzzle #3
White to play
I would like to thank you for reading my guide on how to begin your chess journey My plan is to make this a regular routine. I love to provide chess lessons and share my love of chess. Also I would appreciate it if you please forgive me if this post is not of your chess level. I will be trying to make each post progressively harder so those of a higher elo, so they can receive more benefit. Please subscribe to my Substack to receive new post as soon I release them.
Thanks for reading Brilliant’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.