Chess is a game for two players on a board of 64 squares, light and dark. Each player starts with 16 pieces: a king, a queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights and eight pawns. The player with the white pieces moves first; the board is set so each player has a light square at the right corner, and each queen starts on her own color. The goal is to checkmate the other player's king. A king that is attacked is in check. If it cannot get out of check, that is checkmate.

Every kind of piece moves in its own way. The king moves one square at a time. A rook moves in straight lines, and a bishop moves along slants; a bishop stays on the color of square it starts on. The queen moves in a straight line in any direction. A knight jumps in an L shape, and it is the only piece that can jump over others; a pawn moves forward, captures on a slant, and can never move back.

Castling is a special move in which the king and a rook move together, once a game. The king always moves two squares. To castle, the king may not have moved, may not be in check, and must not pass through an attacked square. In an en passant capture, a pawn captures an enemy pawn that has just moved two squares, as if it had moved only one. This is only legal on the move right after the two-square advance.

A game can end in a draw in several ways. In stalemate, a player has no legal move but is not in check. A game is drawn if the same position happens three times; a player can claim a draw when fifty moves each go by with no pawn move and no capture. A game is also drawn when neither player can possibly checkmate, for example when too few pieces are left. A player who runs out of time on the clock loses.

Chess began in northern India, as a game called chaturanga, around the 400s CE and certainly before the 600s. In the 1850s the American Paul Morphy toured Europe and beat almost every top player he met. William Steinitz was recognized as the first world chess champion, and he held the title until 1894. Emanuel Lasker was champion for 27 years, the longest reign of any champion.

In 1921 the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca beat Lasker to become the third world champion. In 1972 the American Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky, 12.5 to 8.5, in a match many people followed. In May 1997 the computer Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in New York. As of November 2026 the highest official FIDE classical rating ever is 2882, reached by Magnus Carlsen in 2014. On December 12, 2024, 18-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju became the youngest world chess champion.

Words to know

• castling: king-rook move
• stalemate: a draw
• checkmate: trapped king
• passant: in passing
• champion: top winner