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Stalemate: The Game's Over but Nobody Won, What's Going on Here?

Stalemate is one of the more confusing concepts to beginners. Stalemate is a case in which neither side wins the game but it is declared a draw. By the laws of chess, you must play a move when it is your turn. Unlike other games, you are not aloud to pass your move. But what happens if you don't have any legal moves? That's where the stalemate rule comes into play. You have no legal moves, but by the laws of chess, you have to play a move. The position is declared as stalemate and the game is drawn. There are also many more ways than stalemate to draw a game. Draws are explained in much more detail later on in this section.

Here is an example of a stalemate position:

In the above position, the king has three places to choose from, g1 (covered by the rook), g2 (also covered by the rook) and h2 (guarded by the bishop) nowhere to go; the pawn can't move; it's stalemate.

Zugzwang: Zug-What?

Why couldn't they just use english? This one is a german word and it's a little more complicated than a lot of things that you've done so far. The word means compulsion to move and it doesn't happen very often. A zugzwang position is one in which it it your turn to move but any move that you make will make your position worse. Below is an example of a zugzwang position for black. He only has one move to make and it costs him the game, if he didn't have to move and could pass his turn, he would be able to escape with a draw. Hopefully the diagram will help you to understand.

If it is black's move, he can only move his pawn forward to h2 because all of the king moves walk into check which we now know is illegal. So, black is forced to play h2 and white plays Nf2++. If black didn't have to move, white never would have won. Below is the final position.

Pretty cool stuff eh? Well, that's your sneak peek at zugzwang, more will await you as you progress, and there's much cooler stuff than just that!

Pawn Promotion

The pawn: not even good enough to be called a piece. They're not very interesting, looks kinda boring and they can only move forward. Something had to be done to spice this piece up. A pawn, as you know, can only move one square forward at a time. Only forward, no sideways stuff. So, an interesting case came up where when the pawn reached the 8th rank, it wouldn't be able to move anymore for the rest of the game. How could this be fixed? The promotion of a pawn! Those who struggle hard and work their way to the eighth rank get to promote to any piece they like! What a prize! When the game originally began, the pawn could only promote to a "mantri" (the predecessor of the queen), which at the time was the lowest of the officer pieces. It wasn't until they introduced the "new queen" that the pawn could promote to anything it liked. Now, the threat of queening is quite a threat indeed: introducing a queen to the game could be deadly.

By the way, a small tidbit of information for you: the promotion of a pawn to anything other than a queen is what is known as underpromotion. Why would anyone want to underpromote? Well, it depends on the position. If there is a tactic in the position which the player can take advantage of only if he underpromotes, then he may choose to do so. Let's take a look at an example of this below.

In this example, white could queen by playing 1. c8=Q and acheive material quality but instead, he plays a devious move: 1. c8=N+! Suddenly, black's king must move and then white will capture the queen for free. This type of maneuver is called a fork. We'll explore forks later on. Now, white ends up a knight up, instead of even and has an easy win in sight. Now more than ever might be a good time to get a board and set up these positions to take a look at them.

Numero Uno Pawn Move

Well, someone decided that pawn promotion was not enough. The game was still too slow and needed to be sped up to provide excitement. Along with the introduction of the "new queen" as I've been calling it, they introduced a rule, where on the pawn's first move it is allowed to move up 2 squares. This picked up the speed of the game and made it more interesting. This rule applies to each pawn, on their first move, not the first move of the game and can be invoked any time you please, but only on the pawn's first move. You can't take this option after the pawn has already moved one square.

Pawn Capturing

Still not enough! this rule, however, has stayed true for the existence of the game. When the pawn captures, it captures different than the other pieces. Instead of capturing the way it moves, forward, the pawn captures diagonally forward and it can't capture forward. This makes it a little more interesting and less predictable. Take a look at the diagram below.

If the pawn captured like all the other pieces, it would have one legal move, however, it doesn't, so it now has two legal moves: 1. bxa6 and 1. bxc6. Note how the notation is recorded. You should now know how all the pieces move and all the rules! Congratulations!

lucky individuals have learned how to play better chess since this page hit the web on 06/28/97.