CHESSTHRILL

The Chess Thrill guide

Chess has a reputation for being hard to get into. It isn’t, really: there are six kinds of piece, a handful of special rules, and one goal. What makes it deep is not the rules but everything that grows out of them.

These guides cover the rules from the ground up, in plain English and with a diagram wherever a picture beats a paragraph. If you already know how the pieces move, skip ahead — each page stands on its own. The last two explain how things work here on Chess Thrill: the time controls you can play, and how your rating is calculated.

How chess worksThe board, the pieces, how to set them up, who moves first and how a game is won — everything you need before your first move.How the pieces moveHow the king, rook, bishop, queen, knight and pawn move and capture, with a diagram of every square each one can reach — and what each piece is worth.Special moves: castling, en passant and promotionThe three special moves in chess — castling, en passant and pawn promotion — with the exact conditions for each, and the situations where they are not allowed.Check, checkmate and stalemateThe difference between check, checkmate and stalemate, the three ways out of a check, and the stalemate trap that costs beginners won games.How a game ends in a drawEvery way a chess game ends without a winner — stalemate, repetition, the fifty-move rule, insufficient material — and how they can save a lost game.Reading chess notationHow to read and write chess moves: square names, piece letters, captures, check, castling, promotion — and the symbols like ! and ?? that annotators use.Opening principlesThe few principles behind a good start in chess — the centre, development, castling, the classic mistakes — before you learn any opening by heart.Your first checkmatesHow to checkmate a lone king with a queen, with a rook and with two rooks — the step-by-step method, the final patterns, and the stalemate trap to avoid.Bullet, blitz and rapid: time controls explainedWhat bullet, blitz, rapid and classical mean, how the chess clock and increments work, what the official rules say — and which time control to choose.How our rating worksHow your Chess Thrill rating is calculated with Glicko-2: why new ratings move so much, what the question mark means, and how bots and abandoned games count.

Looking for the great games of chess history, explained move by move? They have a section of their own: Immortal Games.

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Chess pieces: “cburnett” set by Colin M. L. Burnett, CC BY-SA 3.0.