Chess Notation

The most common form of chess notation is called algebraic notation. It is vital to learn this if you want to follow games in newspapers, read modern chess books or enter competitions. The older descriptive notation can be used but it is generally harder to follow and limited now to older chess texts. Algebraic Notation If you take the white side of the board, you will often see the letters a through to h written left to right at the bottom, and numbers 1 to 8 marked up the side. These allow you to easily find the co-ordinates of any square. For example, when the games starts, whites Rooks are placed on the corners a1 and h1 while Black's Rooks are on a8 and h8. You will sometimes hear chess players talk about ranks and files. Ranks are the rows that run from left to right and correspond to the numbers 1-8; so Black's King starts on the 8^th rank. Similarly rows are the columns on the board corresponding to the letters a-h; so both Kings start on the e file Pieces are described by the first letter of their name except the Knight which uses N. So we have:

11. King
17. Queen
18. Rook
2. Bishop
14. Knight
16. Pawn (rarely used)

Puting all this together we can denote a move by writing a piece's label and the square it moves. For example, to move a Knight to the top-right square we can write this as Nh8. The convention for recording pawn moves is to leave out the P so if the pawn before the White King moves two squares forward, this would be recorded simply as e4. There are a couple of special cases that need to be remembered;

Captures

If a move results in the capture of an opposing piece, write x between the piece letter and the destination square. For example, if aBishop catures a piece on square g5 you would write Bxg5 and read this as Bishop takes g5. If a Pawn captures, using its starting file to describe the capture; so White's move exd5 describes a Pawn capture from e4 to d5

Check and Mate

To indicate when a move puts an opponent in check use the + symbol; for checkmates use the # symbol

Ambiguous Moves

Sometimes two similar pieces can move to the same square so you need a way to distinguish which one you mean. This is done by adding the rank or file of the pices after its name when writing the move. For example Rad1 says The Rook on the a-file moves to d1. If a Knight moves to f3 from e1 and his fellow Knight is on e5, then we can write the move as N1f3 and it is clear which Knight made the move.

Comments

You can also comment on a move as you write it by adding punctuation marks after the move. This is not often done during a game but you will see it in printed games. The most common commentary symbols are

• !! very good move!
• !? uncertain move but probably good
• ?? usually a blunder or very poor move
• ?! uncertain move and probably poor