The Everything Chess Basics Book (16 page)

Speed or Rapid Chess

Chess players often want to play a great number of games very quickly. There are various reasons for wanting to do this, but we’ll just look at how to do it. For that you need a chess clock. You set the clock for five minutes for each player (or seven minutes, three minutes, or thirty minutes or whatever you want) and commence playing.

As long as the players remember to push in the button at the top of their side of the clock, the game will move along until someone plays a checkmate or gets one of various drawn positions. Or until somebody’s flag falls. That person has run out of time and automatically loses, just as if he had been checkmated.

Bullet Play

A variation on speed play is the bullet chess so popular on the Internet. That usually allows one minute for the game by each player. Of course, you don’t use a digital or a mechanical clock for such chess, since the clock is automatic, and your move triggers the change of time from you to your opponent and back again.

Slower Time Limits

Yet another way to use a chess clock is to give each player a set amount of time for a set amount of moves. A very popular time limit used to be forty moves in two hours. In this version of timed chess, the players must keep score of the game if they want to be able to make a claim that their opponent overstepped the time limit. Otherwise, how could anybody know that the forty moves were reached?

New rules have been made to accommodate players who are easily winning the position but have no time to play out the win. These include lack of mating material, insufficient losing chances, and a new device on chess clocks known as
time increments
. It’s all there waiting for you if you should decide to get involved in tournament chess.

In a slower time limit, keeping track of the moves is an essential ingredient. You will learn more about keeping score of a game in the next chapter.

Chapter 6
Notation

Chess notation is probably as old as chess. It is nothing more than a way to record games and positions and problems and combinations so that they can be reproduced. Such notation provides a way to read and write chess, so a record can be kept of any chess game.

Why Keep Records?

There are many reasons for keeping a record of a chess game. Unless you have a fantastic memory, keeping score of a game is the best way to have the moves available for critique afterward. This is one of the best ways to improve your game, whether the critique is done by you alone, or you with your opponent (better), or you and your opponent along with a third party, perhaps an experienced player (best).

The Chess World

Knowing how to read a game score brings the entire world of chess into your home. There are newspaper columns, chess magazines, and a fantastically huge number of chess books on the market. Chess masters have been writing down their thoughts, analysis, and systems for hundreds of years. This is all open to one who knows how to read chess notation and opaque to one who does not know how.

Chess-playing computers, chess-playing software programs, huge chess databases, and chess Web pages all use chess notation. You’re missing out on an awful lot if you don’t know how to read chess.

If you ever decide that you want to improve at chess, you will need to know chess notation. Whether you want to get good enough to beat the computer or someone in particular or to gain a national or international title or rating, you simply cannot progress without it. No coach or teacher will be able to do much with you if you don’t have game scores to work with, and you won’t even be able to scrutinize your own games without this knowledge.

Blindfold chess, and especially simultaneous blindfold chess, can only be accomplished by those who understand chess notation. The chess master, who has no set or board in sight, calls out her moves. The opponent or opponents, who have sets and boards in front of them and can see the game in progress, call out their response.

Win on Time

You win if your opponent runs out of the allotted time before making the prescribed number of moves in a tournament game. The only way to show that this has indeed happened, though, is to have your game score ready along with the clock that shows the time is up. Obviously this cannot be done unless you have kept a record of the game.

Correspondence and e-mail chess are not possible without chess notation. For that matter, chess played over the telephone and blindfold chess are also prohibitively difficult without a notation system.

There have been more books written about chess than about all other games combined. The game has a wide appeal, and its language is understood all over the world. Knowing the language of chess can put you in touch with people from every corner of the globe.

You Already Know the Basics!

After having just learned how widespread chess is, would it be a surprise to learn that you already know the basics of chess notation? Well, prepare to be surprised, because you already do!

You already know what each square is called, after all, and you know the names of each and every rank and file and diagonal on the board. In addition, you already know the names of all the chess pieces and pawns and the names of their special moves. You also know about check, checkmate, and stalemate.

The chessboard is accompanied by the letters of the files £ and the numbers of the ranks.

Battleship

Have you ever played Battleship? That’s the game where you hide your ships on a grid and try to destroy the ships of your opponent on his grid by calling out coordinates. The grids aren’t checkered, but the grid coordinates are none other than chess square coordinates: e1, g2, h4, a7, etc. All right, so there are a few other things to know about chess notation, but again, you are already familiar with everything here.

Recording Your Opinion

You can record your opinion about a move of a chess game very succinctly: Just use punctuation. The following table of punctuation marks that follow moves is understood all over the world. Whenever you see such punctuation after a move, you know that it is the opinion of the annotator (the one writing about the game).

Specifics

Pieces are designated by capital letters: K is for king, Q is for queen, R is for rook, B is for bishop, and N is for knight (not K since that is reserved for the king). The pawn has no symbol. It used to be P, but that has been done away with in the interest of simplicity.

Moves are written as the piece symbol of the piece being moved and the square that piece lands on. Captures are indicated by an x between the piece symbol and the square the capture takes place on. Check is indicated by a + after the move, and checkmate is indicated simply by writing checkmate after the move that produces it. Stalemate is handled in the same way.

Any ambiguities (such as when you have a rook on a1 and a rook on h1 and nothing in between and want to move one of your rooks to d1) are handled by simply adding an extra identifying letter or number. In the case just cited, Rad1 or Rhd1 will convey your meaning precisely.

Keep in mind that all square names and file symbols contain lowercase letters only. Capital letters are reserved for the piece symbols.