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by Stryker Smith

Welcome to the strategic and fun world of chess! Chess is a great way to meet new people, challenge friends to a battle of wits, and improve your planning ability. While the game might be intimidating at first, learning is actually quite simple. The most important and fastest way to learn is to practice. Find a friend you can play with on a regular basis. Play with your family. And above all, have fun!

The goal of chess is to capture your opponent's king. It's that simple. Many people get obsessed over smaller, less important goals, like capturing other pieces or maneuvering your own pieces to a certain area on the board. They often forget this basic goal. The game is played on a standard checkerboard (8x8 squares), with the board oriented so that a white square is in your lower right corner.

Players take turns moving one piece at a time until either player wins or a stalemate (a tie) occurs. A stalemate is when the defending player cannot move his pieces without losing his king, but no piece is threatening his king. I will explain this in larger detail later in the article.

Let's talk about pieces now. The king is your most important piece; it is usually the tallest piece, with a cross on top. The king can move one space at a time, and moves horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Next to your king is your queen, which can move in the same directions as the king, but can travel to any square along a straight path. For instance, if you queen was on your back row, or home row, it can move to any square in the queen's row (horizontally) or column (vertically), or any square diagonally. These two pieces, the king and queen, are considered the most important pieces in your "army."

Next, let's talk about the bishop and knight. The bishop is next to the king and queen, and usually has a rounded hat with a slit in it, like a real bishop. The bishop can move to any square diagonally, but not horizontally or vertically. If you look at a checkerboard, you will quickly see that a bishop always stays on the same color square, light or dark, whichever it starts on. You have two bishops, so naturally one bishop stays on the light squares and one stays on the dark squares. The knight is much more complicated, and is (usually) the hardest piece to learn. The knight usually looks like a horse's head, although sometimes can be a horse with a knight riding it. Movement of the knight is different in two ways: it can jump over other pieces, and it doesn't move in a straight line.

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