Chess

Components

A two-player game: one player takes the white pieces, the other the black pieces.

Tournament play often adds a chess clock. The basic rules work perfectly well without one.

Setup and objective

1. 1Place the board so that each player's near-right corner square is light.
2. 2Arrange your 16 pieces across your own two ranks as shown. Both sides' setups mirror each other.
3. 3White always moves first. The objective is to checkmate the opponent's king.

Taking a turn

1. 1Players alternate turns, each moving one of their own pieces according to its rules (castling is the only exception, counting as a single move of two pieces).
2. 2If the destination square holds an opponent's piece, that piece is captured and removed. You may never move onto a square you already occupy.
3. 3There is no passing — as long as you have at least one legal move, you must make one.

How each piece moves

Special moves — castling, en passant and promotion

Castling is the only move that shifts two pieces at once. The king moves two squares toward a rook, and that rook moves to the square the king just crossed.

• Castling is illegal if the king or that rook has ever moved before (even if it moved and returned to its original square).
• Castling is illegal if there is any piece between the king and the rook.
• Castling is illegal if the king is currently in check, or if the square it passes through or the square it lands on is attacked by an opposing piece.

En passant lets you capture an opponent's pawn that has just advanced two squares from its starting square to land beside yours, treating it as though it had moved only one square.

Promotion happens when a pawn reaches the farthest rank from its start: it must immediately become a queen, rook, bishop or knight of the same colour.

Notation basics

The board's vertical columns are called files, lettered a–h from White's left, and the horizontal rows are called ranks, numbered 1–8 starting from White's side. A square is named by its file then rank (e.g. e4).

A real game score reads like '1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6', alternating one move per side. The number marks the move count, with White's move and Black's move written side by side. A square name with no piece letter in front of it means a pawn move.

Check, checkmate and draws

• If your move puts the opponent's king where it could be captured next, that is check. The checked player must block it, move the king away, or capture the attacking piece.
• If there is no legal move that gets out of check, that is checkmate, and the game ends immediately — the checkmated side loses.
• If a player has no legal move at all but is not in check, that is stalemate, and the game is drawn. Even a clearly winning side only draws if it stalemates the opponent.

• If neither side can possibly checkmate the other with any sequence of legal moves, that is a dead position and the game is drawn.
• A draw may be claimed when the same position occurs for a third time, or when 50 moves pass for each side with no capture and no pawn move.
• The players may also agree to a draw at any time.
• In tournaments, results are scored as 1 point for a win, 0.5 for a draw and 0 for a loss, to compare standings across several games.

Basic strategy

• Don't leave your king stranded in the centre early on — castle early to tuck it away safely.
• Develop your bishops and knights quickly so they have room to act.
• Since the queen and rooks are blocked by anything in their path, check whether your own pieces are blocking each other's lines.
• The knight is the only piece that jumps over others, so its L-shaped move is especially useful in cramped positions.

Formats and variants

• Classical, rapid and blitz: the same rules played with a chess clock giving each side progressively less time. Running out of time (flag-fall) loses the game.
• Fischer Random (Chess960): the back rank pieces are shuffled randomly at the start, designed to reduce reliance on memorised opening theory. Castling conditions are adjusted to fit the resulting setup.

Frequently asked questions

History and today

The recorded history of chess begins with chaturanga in 7th-century India. The game travelled through Persia into the Arab world and then into Europe, changing along the way.

The queen's and bishop's modern, powerful moves, along with castling and en passant, were established in Europe by the end of the 15th century. The Staunton piece design later became the standard for competition, and the International Chess Federation (FIDE) now writes and maintains the official Laws of Chess.

Wilhelm Steinitz became the first universally recognised World Champion in 1886, and in 2024 Gukesh Dommaraju became champion at a remarkably young age. In 1997, the computer Deep Blue became the first machine to defeat a reigning World Champion, and chess engines have since surpassed human playing strength by a wide margin.

In Korea, chess has long been less well known than baduk (go) or janggi, but interest grew after the 2020 Netflix series 'The Queen's Gambit', alongside a rise in online play. The 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games was the first Asian Games to include chess as an official event.

Namuwiki attributes chess's long-standing low profile in Korea partly to baduk's much greater popularity and to janggi, a similar traditional game that was already well established there. Read together, that suggests Koreans simply had fewer opportunities to encounter chess.