The rules of chess, and the words people use
Two kinds of page. The rules, for anyone who wants to know exactly what a piece can do and what happens when the king has no moves left. And the vocabulary, for anyone who has just been told their bishop is bad and would like to know what that means.
- 22 rules pages
- 27 glossary terms
- Every diagram engine-checked
- Free, no account needed
Chess has fewer rules than most people expect and more edge cases than almost anyone is told. You can learn how the pieces move in ten minutes. Then a pawn takes one of yours by moving to a square it was never on, and somebody says the word en passant at you, and you find out that the ten minutes covered about eighty per cent of it.
So these pages go all the way down. Not just how the king moves, but whether you can castle out of check, what happens when a player has no legal move at all, and which endings the rules call a draw before anyone has played them out.
Everything with a board on it was checked before it was published. The dots showing where a piece can go, the moves in every line, the word "stalemate" under a position: all of it comes from the same rules engine that runs the trainer, computed while the page was being built. Nothing here is written from memory, because a rules page that is wrong once is a rules page that cannot be trusted anywhere.
How the pieces move
Start here. One page per piece, each with the piece's legal moves drawn on the board by the engine rather than by hand, plus the questions that always come next: can it jump, can it go backwards, why is mine stuck.
- Board setupWhich way round, and what goes where
- PawnForwards to move, diagonally to take
- KnightAn L shape, over anything in the way
- BishopDiagonals only, one colour forever
- RookStraight lines, and it likes open ones
- QueenEverything a rook and a bishop can do
- KingOne square, and never into danger
- Piece valuesWhat each piece is worth, and why
The special moves
Three moves break the pattern the other rules set up, and all three are where new players get caught. Castling moves two pieces at once. En passant captures a pawn that is not on the square you land on. Promotion turns a pawn into a queen, or into something else on purpose.
How a game ends
Checkmate is one of six ways a game of chess can finish and it is not even the most common at club level. These pages cover all of them, including the three draws that happen by rule whether or not either player wants them.
- CheckThe king is attacked and you must answer
- CheckmateCheck with no legal reply, and the game is over
- StalemateNo legal move, no check, and it is a draw
- DrawsAll the ways a chess game ends in half a point
- Threefold repetitionThe same position, three times
- Fifty-move ruleFifty moves with nothing happening
- Insufficient materialNobody has enough left to mate
- Perpetual checkChecking forever, on purpose
Reading and writing chess
Every chess book, every puzzle answer and every game you will ever replay is written in the same short code. It takes about fifteen minutes to learn and it opens all of it.
The clock
The other half of a chess game. Two numbers and a plus sign decide whether you are playing bullet or an afternoon, the three organisations that name the categories do not agree with each other, and running out of time is one of the ways a game ends.
Pawn structure
Pawns are the only pieces that cannot go back, so every pawn move is permanent and the shape they end up in decides where the pieces belong. These are the words for the shapes.
Pieces and squares
Where a piece stands is most of what it is worth. A knight on the wrong square is worth less than a pawn on the right one, and these entries are the vocabulary for saying which is which.
Time and plans
The advantages that do not show up in a material count: being a move ahead, being the one asking the questions, and stopping a plan before it is played.
Endgame words
The endgame has its own language, and most of it is about kings and waiting. These four come up in almost every king and pawn ending you will ever play.
Words you hear at the board
The rest of the vocabulary: what an engine review means when it says your piece was en prise, what people mean by winning the exchange, and the two best names in chess.
Looking for tactics instead?
The vocabulary on this page is the language of the game. The motif library is the part you drill: forks, pins, skewers, back rank mates, deflection, every pattern with worked positions and puzzles to practise it on.