Chess Moves - Knowing How to Move Chess Pieces

When playing chess, your goal is to make the right moves in a game of chess to trap your opponent’s king and get checkmate. To do this you will use chess moves in order to attack and capture your opponent’s chess pieces, while also consider chess move to protect your own pieces.

Let’s look at some of the more interesting chess moves that you can use to improve your game:

En passant is a term that describes a chess move in the board game of chess, which loosely translated from French, means ‘in the pawn’s passing’ or ‘in passing’. En passant is a particular chess capture move made instantly after a chess player moves his or her pawn 2 squares forward from its starting position, and the opposition’s pawn could’ve captured it as if it had only moved 1 square forward.

Castling is a special chess move, which involves the king and either of the original rooks of the same color. The castling move consists of moving the king 2 squares towards a rook, then moving the rook onto the square over which the king crossed. It is considered a king move.

Castling on the king side is sometimes referred to as castling short and castling on the queen side is sometimes referred to as castling long; the difference being whether the rook progresses two or three squares.

Promotion is a term that describes moves in a game of chess that lead to the transformation of a pawn in its eighth rank into the chess player's choice of a queen, rook, knight, or bishop of the same color.

The new chess piece then replaces the pawn on the last square it reached. Promotion makes it possible for a player to have more than 1 queen or more than 2 bishops, rooks, or knights. Since the newly promoted piece starts on the previous pawn’s square, it enables a player to have more than 1 bishop on the same square color.

A threatened king is said to be in check. Either the threat on the king’s life must be stopped by placing a piece between the threatening chess piece and the king, or prevented by capturing the threatening chess piece. The king can also be moved to a square where it is no longer in check.

In regular chess, the knight is the only piece that may jump pieces, provided that the destination square must be either empty or occupied by one of the opposing pieces. The knight's movements is rather different from other pieces as it moves in an L shape - 2 squares either forward, backward, left, or right and then 1 square left or right. This special jumping feature can make the knight a very useful chess piece, especially at the start of the game.

Checkmate is a chess move in which a player's king is placed ‘in check’ or threatened to be captured and there is no way to get out of or meet that threat. Delivering checkmate is any chess player’s ultimate goal. After all, a player who is checkmated loses the game.