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Stalemate
Stalemate is a situation in the game of chess where the player whose turn it is to move is not in check and has no legal move. Stalemate results in a draw. During the endgame, stalemate is a resource that can enable the player with the inferior position to draw the game rather than lose. In more complex positions, stalemate is much rarer, usually taking the form of a swindle that succeeds only if the superior side is inattentive. Stalemate is also a common theme in endgame studies and other chess problems. The outcome of a stalemate was standardized as a draw in the 19th century. Before this standardization, its treatment varied widely, including being deemed a win for the stalemating player, a half-win for that player, or a loss for that player; not being permitted; and resulting in the stalemated player missing a turn. Stalemate rules vary in other games of the chess family. Etymology and usage The first recorded use of stalemate is from 1765. It is a compounding of ...
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Checkmate
Checkmate (often shortened to mate) is any game position in chess and other chess-like games in which a player's king is in check (threatened with ) and there is no possible escape. Checkmating the opponent wins the game. In chess, the king is never actually captured—the player loses as soon as the player's king is checkmated. In formal games, it is usually considered good etiquette to resign an inevitably lost game before being checkmated. If a player is not in check but has no legal move, then it is ''stalemate'', and the game immediately ends in a draw. A checkmating move is recorded in algebraic notation using the hash symbol "#", for example: 34.Qg3#. Examples A checkmate may occur in as few as two moves on one side with all of the pieces still on the board (as in Fool's mate, in the opening phase of the game), in a middlegame position (as in the 1956 game called the Game of the Century between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fischer), or after many moves with as few a ...
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Swindle (chess)
In chess, a swindle is a ruse by which players in a losing position trick their opponent and thereby achieve a win or draw instead of the expected loss. It may also refer more generally to obtaining a win or draw from a clearly losing position. I. A. Horowitz and Fred Reinfeld distinguish among "traps", "pitfalls", and "swindles". In their terminology, a "trap" refers to a situation where players go wrong through their own efforts. In a "pitfall", the beneficiary of the pitfall plays an active role, creating a situation where a plausible move by the opponent will turn out badly. A "swindle" is a pitfall adopted by a player who has a clearly lost game. Horowitz and Reinfeld observe that swindles, "though ignored in virtually all chess books", "play an enormously important role in over-the-board chess, and decide the fate of countless games". Although "swindling" in general usage is synonymous with cheating or fraud, in chess the term does not imply that the swindler has done anyt ...
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King And Pawn Versus King Endgame
The chess endgame with a king and a pawn versus a king is one of the most important and fundamental endgames, other than the basic checkmates. It is an important endgame for chess players to master, since most other endgames have the potential of reducing to this type of endgame via exchanges of pieces. Players need to be able to determine quickly whether a given position is a win or a draw, and to know the technique for playing it. The crux of this endgame is whether or not the pawn can be promoted (or queened), so checkmate can be forced. In the first paragraph of one of his books on endgames, Peter Griffiths emphasized the importance of this endgame: There is simply no substitute to a clear understanding of when and how these positions are won or drawn, not only so that one can play them accurately, but in order to recognize in advance what the correct result should be. If you can do that, you can exchange off quite confidently from a more complex position. In the positio ...
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Queen Versus Pawn Endgame
The chess endgame of a queen versus pawn (with both sides having no other pieces except the kings) is usually an easy win for the side with the queen. However, if the pawn has advanced to its seventh rank it has possibilities of reaching a draw, and there are some drawn positions with the pawn on the sixth rank. This endgame arises most often from a race of pawns to promote. The side with the queen is the ''attacker'' and the side with the pawn the ''defender''. Assume that the attacker has the move. If the pawn is not beyond its sixth rank, the attacker (to move) usually wins easily, but there are a few exceptions. The winning process is to either get the queen on a square in front of the pawn and getting the king over to help win the pawn or to check the defending king until it is forced in front of the pawn and using that tempo to bring the king closer, until it can assist in winning the pawn. After the pawn is won, the attacker has an elementary checkmate. Queen versus a p ...
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Draw (chess)
In chess, there are a number of ways that a game can end in a draw, neither player winning. Draws are codified by various rules of chess including stalemate (when the player to move is not in check but has no legal move), threefold repetition (when the same position occurs three times with the same player to move), and the fifty-move rule (when the last fifty successive moves made by both players contain no or pawn move). Under the standard FIDE rules, a draw also occurs in a dead position (when no sequence of legal moves can lead to checkmate), most commonly when neither player has sufficient to checkmate the opponent. Unless specific tournament rules forbid it, players may agree to a draw at any time. Ethical considerations may make a draw uncustomary in situations where at least one player has a reasonable chance of winning. For example, a draw could be called after a move or two, but this would likely be thought unsporting. In the 19th century, some tournaments, notab ...
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Chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to distinguish it from related games, such as xiangqi (Chinese chess) and shogi (Japanese chess). The recorded history of chess goes back at least to the emergence of a similar game, chaturanga, in seventh-century India. The rules of chess as we know them today emerged in Europe at the end of the 15th century, with standardization and universal acceptance by the end of the 19th century. Today, chess is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide. Chess is an abstract strategy game that involves no hidden information and no use of dice or cards. It is played on a chessboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. At the start, each player controls sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, ...
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Chess Problem
A chess problem, also called a chess composition, is a puzzle set by the composer using chess pieces on a chess board, which presents the solver with a particular task. For instance, a position may be given with the instruction that White is to move first, and checkmate Black in two moves against any possible defence. A chess problem fundamentally differs from over-the-board play in that the latter involves a struggle between black and white, whereas the former involves a competition between the composer and the solver. Most positions which occur in a chess problem are 'unrealistic' in the sense that they are very unlikely to occur in over-the-board play. There is a good deal of specialized jargon used in connection with chess problems; see glossary of chess problems for a list. Definition The term "chess problem" is not sharply defined: there is no clear demarcation between chess compositions on the one hand and puzzles or tactical exercises on the other. In practice, however ...
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King (chess)
The king (♔, ♚) is the most important piece in the game of chess. It may move to any adjoining square; it may also perform a move known as castling. If a player's king is threatened with capture, it is said to be in check, and the player must remove the threat of on the next move. If this cannot be done, the king is said to be in checkmate, resulting in a loss for that player. A player cannot make any move that places their own king in check. Despite this, the king can become a strong offensive piece in the endgame or, rarely, the middlegame. In algebraic notation, the king is abbreviated by the letter K among English speakers. The white king starts the game on e1; the black king starts on e8. Unlike all other pieces, only one king per player can be on the board at any time, and the kings are never removed from the board during the game. Placement and movement The white king starts on e1, on the first to the right of the queen from White's perspective. The black k ...
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Endgame Study
In the game of chess, an endgame study, or just study, is a composed position—that is, one that has been made up rather than played in an actual game—presented as a sort of puzzle, in which the aim of the solver is to find the essentially unique way for one side (usually White) to win or draw, as stipulated, against any moves the other side plays. If the study does not end in a mate or stalemate, it should be obvious that the game is either won or drawn, and White can have a selection of many different moves. There is no limit to the number of moves which are allowed to achieve the win; this distinguishes studies from the genre of direct mate problems (e.g. "mate in 2"). Such problems also differ qualitatively from the very common genre of tactical puzzles based around the middlegame, often based on an actual game, where a decisive tactic must be found. Composed studies Composed studies predate the modern form of chess. Shatranj studies exist in manuscripts from the 9th cent ...
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List Of Chess Variants
This is a list of chess variants. Many thousands of variants exist. The 2007 catalogue ''The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants'' estimates that there are well over 2,000, and many more were considered too trivial for inclusion in the catalogue. Chess-derived games These chess variants are derived from chess by changing the board, board setup, pieces, or rules. Standard rules and standard piece types Many variants employ standard chess rules and mechanics, but vary the starting position of the pieces or number of pieces. Standard rules, standard piece types, variant board In these variants, the same pieces and rules as in chess are used, but the board is different; It can be smaller or larger, the shape of either the board or individual spaces can be non-square or modular, or it can even be extra-dimensional or unbounded. The movement of pieces in some variants is modified in concurrence with the geometry of the gameboard. * Active Chess: Played on a 9×8 board, adding a ...
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Zugzwang
Zugzwang (German for "compulsion to move", ) is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because of their obligation to make a move; a player is said to be "in zugzwang" when any legal move will worsen their position. Although the term is used less precisely in games such as chess, it is used specifically in combinatorial game theory to denote a move that directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss. Putting the opponent in zugzwang is a common way to help the superior side win a game, and in some cases it is necessary in order to make the win possible. The term ''zugzwang'' was used in German chess literature in 1858 or earlier, and the first known use of the term in English was by World Champion Emanuel Lasker in 1905. The concept of zugzwang was known to chess players many centuries before the term was coined, appearing in an endgame study published in 1604 by Alessandro Salvio, one of the first writ ...
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Wrong Rook Pawn
In chess endgames with a bishop, a pawn that is a may be the wrong rook pawn. With a single bishop, the result of a position may depend on whether or not the bishop controls the square on the chessboard on which the pawn would promote. Since a side's rook pawns promote on opposite-colored squares, one of them may be the "wrong rook pawn". This situation is also known as having the ''wrong-colored bishop'' or '' wrong bishop'', i.e. the bishop is on the wrong colored squares in relation to the rook pawn. In many cases, the wrong rook pawn will only draw, when any other pawn would win. A fairly common defensive tactic is to get into one of these drawn endgames, often through a sacrifice. In some endgames such as having a bishop and pawn versus a lone king (perhaps with pawns), the wrong rook pawn is the one whose promotion square is the opposite color as that on which the bishop resides, which makes the stronger side unable to win. This was known at least as early as 1623 because ...
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