In case you need to learn how the pieces move, here‘s everything you need to know. Now add eight white pawns in the second rank and eight black pawns in the seventh rank, and you have the initial position of the game of chess. The other half of the board is the kingside. Yes, that’s where the kings go! So from the d file to the nearest corner, that’s the queenside for both black and white. Notice that the queen’s initial square matches their color: d1 is a light square, and d8 is a dark square.Īt this point, only one square should be empty in both sides’ bottom ranks: e1 and e8. From White’s perspective, the queen goes on d1 and for Black on d8. Now, why are they called queenside and kingside? Of course, because of the placement of the queen and king. Knights go next to rooks, and bishops of the same color always run on different color complexes If you have your two bishops running in the same color complex, check your position. Notice that both pairs of bishops will always be in opposite colors. Next to rooks, we place knights and then bishops. So, for Black, the queenside rook is the one on a8, and the one on h8 is the kingside rook. Notice that here you shouldn’t think in terms of left and right but in terms of queenside and kingside. Thus, the left-side rook should be on a1 and is also called the queenside rook, while its colleague goes on h1 and it is the kingside rook. Unless you play the chess variant known as Chess 960 or Fischer Random Chess (where the pieces are shuffled in the first rank), the chess pieces have a fixed initial position.īoth for White and Black, the rooks go on the corners of the board. You can learn more about chess notation in this article. But making sure the lower-left corner is a dark square is paramount! Otherwise, important chess geometry will be altered. In practice, it doesn’t make a difference if the coordinates are set the other way around or if they are not there. If you use a board with coordinates, the lower-left square should be a1 for white and h8 for black. One last thing, coordinates make identifying the squares’ names easier, but their name is the same if the board didn’t have coordinates. It takes some time getting used to understanding coordinates (it’s much easier once both players have a board in front of them). The square at the right of a1 is b1 and on top of a1 is a2. For example, the famous lower-left square is a1 for White and h8 for Black. First look for the file a square is in and then the rank. Now that you understand files and ranks, you can finally name squares! How? By crossing files with ranks. For Black, the 8th rank is the most immediate, and the 1st rank is the most distant. The nearest to the bottom is the first rank, and the farthest is the 8th rank. Ranks are also counted from White’s side. For Black, the a file is on the right side of the board. So, from White’s viewpoint, the first file from the left is the a file, then the b file, and up to the h file. These are coordinates, and they serve to name the files and ranks on the board. Now, some boards have numbers and letters in their frame. There’s a simple hack always to get it the right way: the lower-left corner should be a dark square! This is true no matter if you are playing white or black – it makes sense if you think about it as the board is symmetrical. The chessboard is an 8×8 grid of light and dark squares and, before getting on to the chess battle, you need to set it right. We all know how influential blockbusters can be, so we decided to make this quick guide to set up the chessboard if the next big movie decides to google it before shooting a scene. After all, there’s only a 50% chance of setting up the board the wrong way. That’s why it is so baffling to see how often the chessboard is wrongfully portrayed on the big screen – or any large medium. And it’s only logical not many activities convey wisdom, wit, and long-term thinking as well as chess does. With chess being more popular than ever, you’ll likely find it referenced in cinema more and more.
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