Learn Chess
Chess Basics: A Step-by-Step Method for Beginners
This is our full method for the basics of chess. Work through it and you'll have the fundamentals in place: the rules, the pieces, and your first checkmate. If you're a complete beginner, you're in the right place.
Here's what you'll find below.
- The rules of the game, with the right vocabulary.
- Games to help the rules sink in easily.
- How to deliver checkmate, with your first exercises (and the notation you need to read the solutions).
- Our advice for starting a game of chess the right way.
- What chess can do for you.
- Our recommendations for playing chess online.
- A short tour of the world of chess.
Give yourself about twenty minutes with this guide and you'll be able to say "I know how to play chess!"
The Chessboard
Before anything else, it helps to learn the right vocabulary. The board itself is called the chessboard. It has 64 squares, 32 light and 32 dark (they're not always literally black and white, whatever the color of your set).
The chessboard has a correct orientation. Both players must have a light square in the bottom right corner.
The 8 vertical files in front of you are labeled with the first eight letters of the alphabet. The 8 horizontal ranks are numbered 1 to 8. Together, this lets you code the board and give coordinates to every square.
So the square marked with a green circle below sits at the intersection of the f-file and the 4th rank. That makes it the square f4.
Here's a little exercise. Can you give the coordinates of the 3 squares marked with a green circle below? The answer is right underneath, so don't peek too fast!
From left to right, those are the squares b3, d6 and g2.
There are also diagonals on the board. You name a diagonal by its first square and its last square. Here, this is the c1-h6 diagonal.
The Names of the Pieces
Here are the different pieces of the game.
From left to right, you have the King, the Queen, the Rook, the Bishop, the Knight and the pawn. Every piece, and the pawn, moves differently, which can make the learning curve feel steep at first.
Don't worry, though. Plenty of little games and puzzles make learning the rules of chess enjoyable. The trick isn't to introduce every piece at once. Instead, play a few small games each time you learn how one piece moves, to lock that movement in before adding the next one.
Let's get started with how the pieces move.
How the Pieces Move
How the Pawn Moves
Pawns always move straight ahead, one square at a time, unless they've never moved before. On their very first move, a pawn can choose to advance one or two squares. A pawn never moves backward, and if a piece or pawn sits directly in front of it, it's blocked.
Pawns capture a pawn or piece one square diagonally ahead of them. The capturing pawn then takes the place of the piece it captured, on that same square.
The black pawn sits one square diagonally from the white pawn. The white pawn can capture the black pawn.
And that's it!
#### Exercise 1: Which White Pawn Can Capture a Black Pawn?
It's the pawn on g4. That pawn can either capture the pawn on f5, or advance to g5. On the other side of the board, the pawns are standing face to face, so they're blocked.
#### Exercise 2: Which Black Pawns Can Be Captured?
The answer is the pawns on a6, d6, f6 and h5. None of the other black pawns are threatened by White. If you were thinking of the pawn on b6, that pawn sits directly in front of the white pawn on b5, so it can't be captured. The same goes for the pawns on c4 and c5. The black pawn on c5 isn't in danger.
A Quick Break: Games to Reinforce What You've Learned
How you continue from here depends a lot on your own situation. If you have a playing partner on hand, we recommend taking a short break and playing a small game to reinforce what you've just learned about pawn movement, before moving on.
Otherwise, keep reading. We'll take good care of you with plenty of exercises to make sure the piece movements really stick.
How the Rook Moves
A rook moves horizontally and vertically, as many squares as it likes. It can't jump over its own pieces or the opponent's.
A rook captures pawns and pieces the same way, taking their place on the square.
The white rook is on the same file as the black pawn. It can capture it if it wants to.
And that's it! You know us by now, we like to follow up with a couple of exercises. Here they are.
#### Exercise 1: Which Black Piece Can the White Rook Capture?
It's the knight on c6. The other knight isn't on the same rank as the rook, so it's not threatened.
#### Exercise 2: Which Black Pieces Can the White Rook Capture?
This time the white rook attacks two pieces, the knight on f8 and the rook on d1. The other pieces aren't on the same rank or file as the rook, so they can't be captured.
How the Bishop Moves
A bishop moves diagonally, as many squares as it likes. It can't jump over its own pieces or the opponent's. Like the rook, the bishop captures pawns and pieces by taking their place on the square.
At the start of the game, each player has two bishops, one on a light square and one on a dark square.
Light-squared bishops stay on light squares for the entire game, and dark-squared bishops stay on dark squares for the entire game.
#### Exercise 1: Which Piece or Pawn Can the White Bishop Capture?
It's the small pawn on g7, attacked by the bishop.
#### Exercise 2: Which Pieces or Pawns Can the White Bishop Capture?
This time it's the pawn on c2 and the rook on g6 that are under threat. The knight isn't on the bishop's diagonal.
How the Queen Moves
Time for the most powerful piece on the board. The queen moves horizontally, vertically and diagonally, as many squares as she likes. She can't jump over her own pieces or the opponent's. Like the rook and the bishop, the queen captures pawns and pieces by taking their place on the square.
#### Exercise 1: Which Pieces or Pawns Can the White Queen Capture?
The knight, the bishop and the pawn are all three attacked by the white queen.
#### Exercise 2: Which Pieces or Pawns Can the White Queen Capture?
Both rooks and the knight are under threat from the queen. This example shows just how far the queen's reach extends across the board.
How the King Moves
The king moves horizontally, vertically and diagonally, one square at a time. In chess, the king represents your life. If it gets captured, you've lost.
How the Knight Moves
We saved the trickiest one for last. Maybe not the best piece, but certainly the one whose movement is hardest to master at first: the knight. The knight moves in an L-shape, three squares by two, whether standing up, lying flat, or upside down. Look closely at the knight below, it can reach every one of these squares.
To reach any of these squares, the knight moves two squares horizontally or vertically, then one square in the other direction. Try it yourself, it works every time. From its starting square to its landing square, it always traces an L-shape of three squares by two. A handy way to remember it is to count "one-two, one" in your head. That's the knight moving two squares one way and one square the other way.
The knight has one big superpower. It jumps over its own pieces and the opponent's.
Time for our exercises.
#### Exercise 1: Which Pawn Can the White Knight Capture?
It's the pawn on g6. For every other pawn on the board, the knight lands next to it instead of on it.
#### Exercise 2: Which Pieces or Pawns Can the White Knight Capture?
The white knight can capture the pawn on d5, the knight on h5 and the rook on g8.
You now know how every piece moves, and that's already a very good start. Well done! To finish setting up your foundations, let's look at how the pieces line up at the start of a game.
Setting Up the Board
The pawns and pieces start the game arranged as shown below.
Look at how the white pieces are arranged. The pieces sit on the first rank and the pawns on the second. The king and queen stand in the center, with the white queen always on a light square. The bishops flank the royal pair, then come the knights, then the rooks.
White always moves first in chess. After that, the two opponents take turns.
Now it's time to learn the actual goal of the game.
The Goal of the Game: Checkmate
We've already said it, but it bears repeating. The goal of the game is to capture the opponent's king. That's why there's a whole vocabulary built around an attacked king. A king under attack is said to be in check. As a matter of etiquette, when a player attacks the opponent's king, it's common to say "check" out loud. Also note that a king is never allowed to put itself in check. The rules forbid it outright.
When a player is in check, three responses are available. You can move the king to safety, block the check by placing a piece in the way, or capture the piece delivering the check. If none of those options exist, meaning the check can't be parried at all, that's checkmate. The game is over.
Let's practice delivering check.
Exercise: Deliver Check to the Black King Using the White Rook
The white rook comes to g1. The black king is now attacked, and White can say "Check!" out loud. Black now has the choice of running with the king, for example to f8, or blocking by dropping the knight into g4 (though the rook would simply take it).
We'll practice delivering checkmate very soon. First, though, it's time for the advanced rules.
The Advanced Rules
If you're a beginner and you've made it this far, a big congratulations is in order.
We've now covered the basic rules of chess. That's already enough to take your first steps, and if you'd rather come back to the advanced rules a little later, that's perfectly fine.
Here are a few slightly more unusual rules that make chess such a rich game.
Pawn Promotion
If a pawn reaches the far end of the board, it can turn into any piece of your choice, except a king or another pawn. This is called promotion. Most players choose a queen, since she's the strongest piece, but there are situations where choosing a different piece works out better. We cover that in our dedicated article on the subject.
Castling
Here's one of the most important rules of all. If the space between your king and your rook is clear, if neither the king nor that rook has ever moved, and if the king isn't currently in check and doesn't pass through or land on a square attacked by an enemy piece, then you may move the king two squares toward the rook and bring that rook to the square right next to the king, on the other side. This is called castling.
Let's see how this actually plays out.
The space between the white king and the rook on h1 is clear. White is ready to castle. The white king moves two squares toward the rook, and the rook comes to sit right next to the king, on the other side.
Why castle at all? To bring your king to safety. Remember, your king is your life, and leaving it in the center of the board isn't necessarily a great idea. Tucking it behind three pawns, well protected, is a lot more comfortable. Castling is one of the big strategic building blocks for getting a good start to a chess game.
The Draw
One quirk of chess is that a game can end in a draw. All it takes is for one player to ask the opponent, right after making a move, "would you like a draw?" and if the opponent agrees, the game is declared drawn. This is called a draw by mutual agreement.
A game can also be declared drawn in a few other specific situations.
- If the same position occurs three times in a game.
- When a player delivers perpetual check to the opponent's king.
- If neither player moves a pawn or captures a piece for 50 consecutive moves (the 50-move rule).
The last rule you need to know for a draw is called stalemate, and it gets its own section right below.
Stalemate
Stalemate is another rule with dramatic strategic consequences. If a player has to move but has no legal move available, that's stalemate, and the game is a draw. Here's an example.
It's White to move, but White has no legal move available. The king is stuck (remember, it's never allowed to move into check), and the white pawns are stuck too. So this is stalemate, and despite Black's enormous material advantage, the game is a draw.
En Passant
The last advanced rule is a subtle one, and its strategic consequences run a little deeper. If a pawn has just advanced two squares and ends up right next to an enemy pawn, that enemy pawn is allowed to capture it. This is called en passant. The capturing pawn moves as if the other pawn had advanced only one square instead of two. Let's look at an example right away.
You have the white pieces. The black pawn on d5 has just advanced two squares. You now have the option, on your very next move and only on that move, to capture en passant with your pawn on e5.
The pawn from e5 lands on d6, exactly as if the black pawn had advanced one square instead of two. A truly unusual rule.
Our Advice for Starting a Game of Chess Well
With so many pieces and pawns moving in different ways, it's easy to feel a little lost at first. That's why it pays to organize your play, and there are a few simple guidelines to follow when starting a game of chess. Here they are.
1. Control the Center of the Board
In chess, the center of the board refers to the four squares marked with a green circle on the diagram below.
Those are the squares d4, e4, e5 and d5. Our first piece of advice is to plant pawns there, to cramp your opponent's game and give yourself as much room as possible to bring your pieces out. So on your very first move, we recommend advancing the pawn in front of your king by two squares.
The idea, if your opponent lets you, is then to bring the pawn in front of your queen to d4, forming what is known as the big pawn center on e4 and d4. That big center controls every square in front of it, which stops your opponent from developing properly. White will also be free to bring pieces out to good squares behind that strong pawn center.
Of course, your opponent might know this plan too, and try to stop you from forming the big center by also pushing the pawn in front of their own king two squares.
Sitting on e5, the black pawn controls the d4 square and stops White from forming the big center. It's now time to bring out the minor pieces, the knights and the bishops.
2. Bring Your Minor Pieces Toward the Center
As you can see, a battle for the center is underway. So let's throw our forces into that battle and bring our knights out to their natural squares, f3 and c3.
From those squares, the knights exert real influence on the center. You can then bring the bishops out as well, following the same opening principles.
3. Win the Race to Develop Your Pieces
There's also a race going on, and whoever finishes bringing their pieces out first is best placed to seize the initiative and attack. Note that in chess, attacking with all your pieces together is far more effective than attacking with just one or two. To win the development race, stick to these principles.
- Bring a piece out directly to a good square, and don't move it a second time without a good reason.
- Don't bring your queen out too early. She can be exposed to attacks that cost you time while helping your opponent develop.
4. Bring Your King to Safety
As you bring your minor pieces out, the space between your king and your rook will open up. That's the perfect moment to castle. Getting your king to safety really is crucial. On the flip side, if you notice your opponent is slow to castle and their king is stuck in the center, that's your cue to try opening lines and attacking.
A fast attack can pay off handsomely in that situation.
5. Put Your Rooks to Work
Plenty of beginners leave their rooks sitting in the corner of the board for the whole game. That's a shame, because after the queen, the rook is the most powerful piece on the board. Once the position opens up, rooks belong on open files, ready to invade the opponent's position. So be ready to put them to work.
What Chess Can Do For You
Let's talk a little about the benefits you can get from playing chess. Chess players have caught the attention of scientists for a very long time. It started with Alfred Binet, who would go on to build the first practical intelligence test a decade later. He studied chess players in 1894 expecting photographic recall, and found something else, that strong players hold on to the meaning of a position rather than a picture of it. Learning to coordinate pieces that all move in completely different ways gives you a way of organizing what you remember.
Michel Noir picked up the thread a century later. In his 2002 doctoral thesis at the University of Lyon he taught chess to classes of ten-year-olds over seven months, then set them tasks that had nothing to do with chess. The clearest advantage he found was in attention and concentration, with the young players making fewer errors on memory tasks than classmates who had not learned.
Because chess brings so much to children's cognitive skills, it's no surprise that school systems have embraced it, in particular as a way to close attainment gaps between students. Playing develops those skills almost without students noticing. Successfully winning a game, or solving a puzzle, also gives a real boost to self-confidence.
Noir's argument is that it's this kind of structured exercise, rather than casual play, that carries the benefit. Simply playing isn't enough on its own to unlock these benefits. What matters is spending a few focused minutes in front of a position, without touching the pieces, studying it the way you'd study a painting. Here's one such exercise, to help you start finding checkmates.
Exercises for Finding Checkmate
Finishing off a game of chess can be tricky. Cornering your opponent's king is hard work. Fortunately, there are simple patterns you can learn to make delivering checkmate much easier. Here's one example, a pattern often nicknamed the kiss of death.
White to move, mate in one.
Before giving you the solution, it's worth taking a short detour through chess notation, which is extremely useful for reading the solutions to chess exercises.
Chess Notation
Pieces are written with their initial. The rook is written R, the bishop B, the knight N, the king K and the queen Q. Qe4 means the queen has moved to the e4 square. Rf5 means the rook has moved to the f5 square.
The pawn is the one exception, it's never written with a letter. e4 simply means a pawn has come to e4. g6 means a pawn has landed on g6.
A capture is written with an x. QxNf5 means the queen has captured the knight sitting on f5. exd4 means the pawn on the e-file has captured the piece on d4.
Now for the special moves.
- Check is written +.
- Checkmate is written ++ or #.
- Kingside castling (castling toward the king's side of the board) is written 0-0. Queenside castling (castling toward the other rook) is written 0-0-0.
- Promotion is written with an equals sign. e8=Q means a pawn has reached e8 and turned into a queen.
That covers the basics of chess notation.
The Solution
The winning move was 1.Qg5.
The 1 in front of the move marks it as the first move of the sequence. Because there's no ellipsis, this is White's move. If it had been Black's move, it would have been written 1... instead.
Back to the position. Once the queen lands on g5, she delivers check to the black king. She controls every possible escape square, and she's protected by the bishop. The black king can't get out of check. That's checkmate!
Take a good look at this pattern. The queen comes to sit right next to the enemy king while a friendly piece protects her. That's the kiss of death. To get better at finding checkmates in your own games, it helps to work through exercises built around the same pattern again and again. Once you have that pattern down, you can move on to another one. Some of the most famous are back-rank mate and smothered mate, both well worth studying, along with checkmate by battery. You'll find a wider collection of the best-known checkmate patterns in our dedicated guide.
Exercises for Practicing Tactics
Tactics are the art of throwing your opponent off balance in just a few moves. They can help you deliver mate, win material, or simply carry out your strategic plans. Strategy, meanwhile, is the long-term vision of the game. Whenever you play, you should always keep both in mind, tactics (is there a short sequence available right now that wins something concrete?) and strategy (what's my plan for the middle to long term?).
Tactics are learned exactly the same way as checkmate patterns, by studying recurring themes. You learn to spot pins, forks, skewers, decoy and deflection sacrifices, and ways to trap your opponent's pieces. Working through these patterns again and again is how you build real tactical strength.
A Tour of the World of Chess
Who Is the Current World Champion?
Magnus Carlsen has won five World Chess Championship titles and is considered one of the greatest players in the history of the game, alongside legends such as Jose Raul Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. Comparing eras is always difficult, but Carlsen's sheer dominance during his reign speaks for itself. He chose not to defend his title after his motivation for match play declined. The current World Champion is Gukesh Dommaraju, who won the crown in December 2024.
Who Are the Top Players With Ties to France?
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave has spent years among the game's elite, reaching as high as world number two at his peak. Alireza Firouzja, born in Iran and playing under the French flag since 2021, is another name that regularly appears at the very top of the world rankings. Carlsen himself once said that facing Firouzja was the only thing that still made another World Championship match tempting.
On the women's side, Marie Sebag has held the International Grandmaster title, and Sophie Milliet, a multiple-time French champion, is another major name in French women's chess. Both have crossed 2400 on the Elo list.
What Is the Elo Rating?
The Elo rating is the rating system used to rank chess players. It's based on a mathematical formula. You start out around 1000 points, a solid club player sits around 2000 Elo, master level begins around 2400, grandmaster level around 2500, and Magnus Carlsen has held the top spot on the list with a peak rating of 2882, the highest ever recorded.
Ratings are managed by FIDE, the international chess federation, and updated every month. To get an official rating, you need to join your national chess federation and take part in either individual tournaments or team competitions through a local chess club.
What About the Chess Clock?
In chess, thinking time is limited. A chess clock is what sets the pace of the game. In official competition, a single game can last several hours. When playing casually with friends, though, players often go for blitz, where each side gets just a few minutes for the whole game. If a player runs out of time before the game is finished, that player loses on time.
What Are the Best Chess Openings?
Italian, Spanish, Sicilian, Orangutan, Dragon. Chess openings have wonderful names! There's no single opening that beats all the others, it's really about finding the one that matches your own style of play.
That said, it's important to master the big strategic principles of the opening first. Once those are second nature, you can move on to specializing in a specific opening.
Here's the opening repertoire we recommend for beginners.
- With White: the Italian Game.
- With Black against
1.e4: the French Defense. - With Black against
1.d4: the Queen's Gambit Accepted.
What these three openings have in common is that they all give you an active game, and learning how to seize the initiative and attack your opponent matters a great deal when you're starting out. It's always frustrating to watch beginners get smothered by an opponent because their own pieces stayed passive. With these three openings in your pocket, that won't happen to you. They also happen to be taught by excellent coaches, starting with the 2018 French champion Tigran Gharamyan for the Italian Game.
How Do You Play Chess Online?
Thousands of players are waiting online to play with you, no matter your level. If you want to keep building on the basics, it's a great idea to sign up on lichess.org, a free platform with no ads, and to jump straight into your first moves and your first games.
We recommend playing against another human, even as a complete beginner. Playing a computer isn't nearly as useful for learning, because bots set to a beginner level deliberately throw in odd moves that feel nothing like the mistakes a human opponent actually makes, and you won't encounter those same patterns once you play real people.
We also recommend playing at a slower pace, at least early in your learning. It might sound obvious, but real progress comes from thinking things through, and that's how you build the logic and reflexes that let you play well.
How Do You Keep Learning Chess?
That part is easy. Keep going with a structured program. We're building a step-by-step lesson series following the method of Grandmaster Tigran Gharamyan, the 2018 French champion, to walk you through the concepts you need to master to play well. Join the waitlist to get it first.
Is Chess Hard to Learn?
Not at all! You can learn the rules of chess in about twenty minutes. That said, you then have an entire lifetime ahead of you to explore its subtleties, learn new strategies and discover new ideas. Even the reigning World Champion learns something new every single day.
Your Move
- Read our full guide to learning to play chess from the ground up.
- Discover the main chess openings, or read up on the chess legend Philidor.
- Work through some daily chess exercises to keep sharpening what you've just learned.
That wraps up this method for the basics of chess. We hope it's been useful, and that your first steps into the world of chess bring you plenty of enjoyment.