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Chess Endgame
In chess and other similar games, the endgame (or end game or ending) is the stage of the game when few pieces are left on the board. The line between middlegame and endgame is often not clear, and may occur gradually or with the quick exchange of a few pairs of pieces. The endgame, however, tends to have different characteristics from the middlegame, and the players have correspondingly different strategic concerns. In particular, pawns become more important as endgames often revolve around attempting to promote a pawn by advancing it to the eighth . The king, which normally should stay hidden during the game should become active in the endgame, as it can help escort pawns to the promotion square, attack enemy pawns, protect other pieces, and restrict the movement of the enemy king. All chess positions with up to seven pieces on the board have been solved, that is, the outcome (win, loss, or draw) of best play by both sides is known, and textbooks and reference works teach t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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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, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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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 wri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Bishop And Knight Checkmate
The bishop and knight checkmate in chess is the checkmate of a lone king which can be by a king, a bishop, and a knight. With the stronger side to move and with perfect play, checkmate can be forced in at most thirty-three moves from any starting position where the defender cannot quickly win one of the pieces. The exception is the "stalemate trap" (see below). These exceptions constitute about 0.5% of the positions. Checkmates are possible with the defending king on any square at the edge of the board but can be forced only from positions with different or if the defending king is in a corner controlled by the bishop or on a square on the edge next to a corner; however, mate adjacent to the corners not controlled by the bishop is only two moves deep (with the same material), so it is not generally encountered unless the defending side plays inaccurately. Although this is classified as one of the four basic or elementary checkmates (the others being king and queen; king and ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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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 as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Connected Pawns
In chess, connected pawns are two or more pawns of the same color on adjacent , as distinct from isolated pawns. These pawns are instrumental in creating pawn structure because, when diagonally adjacent, like the two rightmost white pawns, they form a , a chain where the one behind protects the one in front. When attacking these chains, the weak spot is the backmost pawn because it is not protected by any other pawn. Discussion Connected pawns that are both passed, i.e., without any enemy pawns in front of them on the same file or adjacent files, are referred to as connected passed pawns. Such pawns can be very strong in the endgame, especially if supported by other pieces. Often the opponent must sacrifice to prevent one of the pawns from promoting. Connected passed pawns are usually superior to other passed pawns. An exception is in an opposite-colored bishops endgame with a bishop and two pawns versus a bishop on the opposite color. If the pawns are connected and not b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Initiative (chess)
Initiative in a chess position belongs to the player who can make threats that cannot be ignored, thus putting the opponent in the position of having to spend turns responding to threats rather than creating new threats. A player with the initiative will often seek to maneuver their pieces into more and more advantageous positions as they launch successive attacks. The player who lacks the initiative may seek to regain it through . Discussion Due to moving first, White starts the game with the initiative, but it can be lost in the opening by accepting a gambit. Players can also lose initiative by making unnecessary moves that allow the opponent to gain tempo, such as superfluous "preventive" (prophylactic) moves intended to guard against certain actions by the opponent, that nonetheless require no specific response by them. The concept of tempo is closely tied to initiative, as players can acquire the initiative or buttress it by gaining a tempo. The initiative is important in a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Max Euwe
Machgielis "Max" Euwe (; May 20, 1901 – November 26, 1981) was a Dutch chess player, mathematician, author, and chess administrator. He was the fifth player to become World Chess Champion, a title he held from 1935 until 1937. He served as President of FIDE, the World Chess Federation, from 1970 to 1978. Early years, education and professional career Euwe was born in the Watergraafsmeer, in Amsterdam. He studied mathematics at the University of Amsterdam under the founder of intuitionistic logic, L.E.J. Brouwer (who later became his friend and for whom he held a funeral oration), and earned his doctorate in 1926 under Roland Weitzenböck. He taught mathematics, first in Rotterdam, and later at a girls' Lyceum in Amsterdam. After World War II, Euwe became interested in computer programming and was appointed professor in this subject at the universities of Rotterdam and Tilburg, retiring from Tilburg University in 1971. He published a mathematical analysis of the game of ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Endgame Tablebase
An endgame tablebase is a computerized database that contains precalculated exhaustive analysis of chess endgame positions. It is typically used by a computer chess engine during play, or by a human or computer that is retrospectively analysing a game that has already been played. The tablebase contains the game-theoretical value (win, loss, or draw) in each possible position, and how many moves it would take to achieve that result with perfect play. Thus, the tablebase acts as an oracle, always providing the optimal moves. Typically the database records each possible position with certain pieces remaining on the board, and the best moves with White to move and with Black to move. Tablebases are generated by retrograde analysis, working backward from a checkmated position. By 2005, all chess positions with up to six pieces, including the two kings, had been solved. By August 2012, tablebases had solved chess for almost every position with up to seven pieces, but the positi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Computer Chess
Computer chess includes both hardware (dedicated computers) and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training. Computer chess applications that play at the level of a chess master or higher are available on hardware from supercomputers to smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available. Stockfish, GNU Chess, Fruit, and other free open source applications are available for various platforms. Computer chess applications, whether implemented in hardware or software, utilize different strategies than humans to choose their moves: they use heuristic methods to build, search and evaluate trees representing sequences of moves from the current position and attempt to execute the best such sequence during play. Such trees are typically quite large, thousands to millions of nodes. The computational speed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Bishop (chess)
The bishop (♗, ♝) is a piece in the game of chess. It moves and captures along without jumping over intervening pieces. Each player begins the game with two bishops. One starts between the and the king, the other between the and the queen. The starting squares are c1 and f1 for White's bishops, and c8 and f8 for Black's bishops. Placement and movement The king's bishop is placed between the king and the king's knight, f1 for White and f8 for Black; the queen's bishop is placed between the queen and the queen's knight, c1 for White and c8 for Black. The bishop has no restrictions in distance for each move but is limited to diagonal movement. It cannot jump over other pieces. A bishop captures by occupying the square on which an enemy piece stands. As a consequence of its diagonal movement, each bishop always remains on one square color. Due to this, it is common to refer to a bishop as a light-squared or dark-squared bishop. Comparison – other pieces Versus rook A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |