Learning Chess — Index - The Board (Part 1)

Learning Chess — Index

Sometimes in movies and TV-Shows you see certain characters playing chess, often to indicate to the audience that the character is an intelligent person. Sometimes chess in a movie serves as a background activity, while two people are discussing certain matters. Have you ever wondered what they were actually doing? Or perhaps you have always been interested in chess, but never got the opportunity to learn it. If so, then this is the series for you! Everyone knows what chess is, but not everyone knows how to play chess. This series will guide you slowly but steadily to a proficiency in playing chess on a beginner level. No, information overload! So, why chess? Perhaps Anatoly Karpov said it best: ‘’Chess is everything: art, science, and sport’’. Besides —in my opinion— you can’t call yourself a proper intellectual if you don’t know at least a bit of chess!

1. Introduction

The Board

Chess pieces

2. Rules

Basic rules

Advanced rules

Checkmate

Stalemate

3. Notation

Chess Notation

4. Tactics

Chess tips and Quotes

Opening moves

Common tactics

5. Chess Fundamentals

Undefended Pieces

Coordination

Typical Mistakes

Learning Chess — The Board

As to avoid information overload, the posts will be short but concise. Your mind will be busy enough with understanding the theory. Let’s start with something simple, the chess board. A chessboard is the type of checkerboard used in the board game chess, consisting of 64 squares (eight rows and eight columns). Interesting fact, Bobby Fischer American chess champion died at the age of 64. The board consists of dark squares and light squares. To add to the atmosphere of Quora, we will be using a red and light-white board for the explanations. The website I will be using is chess.com.

The board

This is a chessboard, as you can see it consists of 8 columns and 8 rows. The columns are indicated by the alphabetical letters, and the rows are indicated by the numbers. As you have guessed, we use these numbers and letters for locating a square on the board. For instance we say, Pawn is on g7:

We can also say that, the cc-file is open. With ‘’cc-file’’ we refer to the column cc, below is an example.

To get more familiar with the board, you can practice coordinates on this website. That’s it for the chessboard, next we will get familiar with the pieces.

Resources to practice chess