Rozman is an International Master and a former semi-professional player who now teaches chess mostly online; when the world shut down in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 he spent a stretch giving six-year-olds private Zoom lessons before deciding YouTube would reach a lot more people, and he's posted chess videos there almost daily ever since (his Twitch archive, he admits, includes a fairly rough 4 a.m. stream from 2018). Chess itself is far older than any of that: the game traces back roughly 1,500 years to sixth-century India, and the rules below are the ones it settled on. This chapter is the reference layer everything else in the book leans on — skim it now, and come back to it whenever a later chapter assumes you already know a rule.
A chessboard is an 8×8 grid of alternating light and dark squares. However you set it up, the square in each player's bottom-right corner must be light. Squares are named by combining a file letter with a rank number: the eight vertical columns (files) are lettered a through h from White's left to right, and the eight horizontal rows (ranks) are numbered 1 through 8 from White's side to Black's. The file always comes first, so the square marked below is f6.
Each side begins with sixteen pieces — thirty-two in total — set up in perfect mirror symmetry. White occupies ranks 1 and 2, Black occupies ranks 7 and 8, and each side's pawns stand in front of its own back rank of major and minor pieces. The queens start on the d-file and the kings on the e-file for both colors, and White always moves first.
Each type of piece moves differently, and none of them (except the knight) may jump over another piece — friend or enemy — that stands in its way. Pieces are also given a rough point value, used only to compare material, never to literally score the game:
| Piece | Value | How it moves |
|---|---|---|
| Pawn | 1 | Straight ahead only; captures diagonally |
| Knight | 3 | L-shape; only piece that can jump over others |
| Bishop | 3 | Diagonally, any distance, stays on one color |
| Rook | 5 | Horizontally or vertically, any distance |
| Queen | 9 | Any straight line or diagonal, any distance |
| King | — | One square in any direction; cannot be captured |
The queen is the most powerful piece: it can slide along any rank, file, or diagonal for as many empty squares as it likes. On an empty board, a queen on d4 could reach any square along the eight directions shown below.
The rook moves the same way as the queen but only along ranks and files, never diagonally.
The bishop is the mirror image: diagonals only. Because each side has one bishop that starts on a light square and one that starts on a dark square, a bishop is permanently confined to squares of its starting color.
The knight moves in an L-shape — two squares along a rank or file, then one square to the side — and it is the only piece allowed to hop over any piece in its path. That is why a knight can spring into the game on the very first move, before any pawns have cleared a path for the other pieces.
That jumping ability makes the knight the only piece that can develop before a single pawn has moved. Every other piece on the back rank is boxed in by its own pawns at the start of the game — a bishop, rook, or queen needs a pawn to clear a path first — but a knight can hop straight from the back rank into the fight on move one.
Pawns are worth 1 point and follow rules unlike any other piece. They move straight ahead one square at a time, except on their very first move, when each pawn may advance either one or two squares. After that first move, it's one square at a time only. Pawns capture diagonally rather than straight ahead — they can never capture a piece directly in front of them, and they can never move diagonally onto an empty square.
When a pawn reaches the far rank — the 8th rank for White, the 1st for Black — it promotes. The player must immediately turn it into a knight, bishop, rook, or queen. A queen is almost always the right choice, since it's the most powerful piece, though rare positions call for underpromoting to a knight or rook instead. Nothing stops you from promoting more than one pawn either: march all eight of them up the board and, in theory, you could finish a game with nine queens on one side.
The strangest pawn rule is en passant ("in passing"). If an enemy pawn uses its two-square first move to land directly beside one of your pawns, you may capture it as though it had only moved one square — but only on your very next move. Miss that window and the right disappears for the rest of the game.
En passant is only legal on the move directly after the two-square pawn push. If you play something else first, you permanently lose the chance to capture that pawn this way.
Like the queen, each side gets exactly one king, and it's the one piece with no point value at all — call it worth zero or worth infinity, since either way the game ends the moment it falls. The king moves one square in any direction and, unlike every other piece, can never be captured — it also can never move to a square where an enemy piece could capture it. That would be an illegal move, not a losing one; no legal chess move ever puts your own king in danger, and no chess website or app will even let you try.
When a piece attacks the king, that's check, and the player in check must respond immediately — by moving the king to safety, blocking the attack with another piece, or capturing the attacker. Any move that leaves the king in check is illegal.
Below, White has played 1.c4 e6 2.d4 and now Black plays ...Bb4+, checking the White king from b4.
Checkmate is check with no way out: the king cannot move to safety, no piece can block, and nothing can capture the attacker. Checkmate ends the game immediately and is the most common way a game of chess is won — the whole subject of the next chapter. Stalemate is different: the side to move is not in check but has no legal move at all. Rather than a loss, stalemate is a draw.
Castling is a special king-and-rook move: the king slides two squares toward one of its own rooks, and that rook jumps to the square the king passed over. It is the only move in chess that moves two pieces at once, and it must satisfy several conditions: neither the king nor that rook may have moved yet, no piece may stand between them, the king may not currently be in check, and the king may not pass through or land on a square attacked by an enemy piece.
Castling does two jobs at once: it tucks the king away from the center where most fighting happens, and it brings a rook into a more active square. That's why it's a core opening goal, covered again in the next two chapters.
Algebraic notation records a move as the piece that moved plus its destination square. Pawns are the exception: they carry no letter, so "e4" simply means a pawn advanced to e4. Every other piece uses a capital letter — B for bishop, N for knight (K is reserved for king), R for rook, Q for queen, and K for king.
A few symbols add detail. An "x" marks a capture (Qxd2). A "+" marks check (Rh8+), and "#" marks checkmate (Rh8#). Promotion is written with "=" followed by the new piece (g8=Q). Castling short is O-O and castling long is O-O-O.
Occasionally two identical pieces could both legally move to the same square, so the destination alone is ambiguous. Notation then adds the departure file or rank: "Nfe6" means the knight on the f-file (not another knight that could also reach e6) makes the move, while "N2d3" means the knight standing on the second rank does.
A game of chess ends in a win, a loss, or a draw. In tournament scoring a win is worth 1 point, a draw is worth ½ point to each player, and a loss is worth 0 — though as of 2022 some events have been experimenting with 3 points for a win and 1 for a draw, to make decisive results more rewarding. Draws are also far more common at the top of the game than fans of most other sports are used to seeing: two grandmasters who both play accurately can fight for hours and still reach a position where neither side can make progress, which can be a frustrating sight if you're expecting a knockout every time.
Your results also feed into a rating called Elo, named after its creator, Hungarian-American physics professor Arpad Elo, which estimates your playing strength relative to other players. You earn an official Elo rating in sanctioned over-the-board events and a rating (often unofficial) on chess websites. The lowest possible rating, online or over the board, is 100. The highest over-the-board rating ever recorded belongs to Magnus Carlsen, who reached 2882 in 2014; online ratings have no fixed ceiling, but the strongest players top out around 3300–3400.
Ratings are not perfectly comparable across websites or federations — a rating of 1500 on one platform is not necessarily the same strength as 1500 elsewhere. FIDE, the International Chess Federation, is treated as the most authoritative Elo for over-the-board play worldwide.
Reading about chess only goes so far — improvement comes from practice, and a few tools make up the modern chess learning ecosystem:
No single activity is enough on its own. Play regularly, review your own games afterward, and mix in puzzles to sharpen pattern recognition — the three reinforce each other. Practice this against an engine or a friend once you've read the rest of the book.
Chess is played on an 8×8 board where every square has an address (file letter, then rank number), and each side commands sixteen pieces that move by fixed rules: the queen and rook in straight lines, the bishop on diagonals, the knight in its unique L-shaped jump over anything in its path, and the pawn one square forward (two on its first move) while capturing only diagonally. Pawns carry two extra wrinkles — en passant, usable for exactly one move after an enemy pawn's two-square push, and promotion into any other piece on reaching the far rank. The king moves only one square at a time, can never be captured or moved into danger, and can perform the two-piece special move castling once per game, provided neither it nor that rook has moved, nothing stands between them, and it isn't in or passing through check. Check must be answered immediately; checkmate — check with no way out — ends the game outright, while stalemate (no legal move but no check either) is a draw. Algebraic notation records each move as piece letter plus destination square, with x for captures, + and # for check and mate, = for promotion, and a file or rank added only when two identical pieces could otherwise reach the same square. Results feed an Elo rating, and real improvement comes from combining games, engine and human analysis, and puzzles — not from any one of them alone.
h7. Files stay the same letter going straight down or up the board; only the rank number changes.
A bishop only moves diagonally, and every diagonal move keeps a piece on squares of the same color. Since each bishop starts on one color, it can never reach the other.
No. A pawn's forward moves (one or two squares) are blocked by any piece in the way, just like any non-capturing move; pawns cannot jump over pieces on their path even on their first move.
It can become a queen, rook, bishop, or knight, the player's choice. A queen is normally best, but underpromoting to a knight or rook is occasionally the stronger move.
No. The right to capture en passant only exists on the move immediately following the two-square push; once White plays something else, that pawn can no longer be captured this way.
In checkmate the king is in check and has no legal way out, so the checkmated side loses. In stalemate the side to move is not in check but has no legal move at all, which ends the game as a draw.
No. Castling requires that the king and that specific rook have never moved at any point in the game, even if the rook ends up back on its starting square.
It tells you which of two knights that could both legally reach e6 is the one moving — specifically the knight standing on the f-file. Plain "Ne6" would be ambiguous.
The knight is the only piece that can jump over other pieces. Every other back-rank piece is blocked by its own pawns until at least one pawn move clears a diagonal or file for it.
Yes. Nothing limits how many pawns can promote, so if all eight of a side's pawns reached the far rank and each became a queen, that side would have its original queen plus eight more.
Bots are tuned to feel human-like rather than to play at full engine strength, and many are built to weaken or "self-destruct" late in the game so the human player wins, which he feels makes the practice less genuine than playing real opponents or a full-strength engine.