|
|
|
|
You might be stupid. A moron. An idiot. A fool. A babbling unintelligent
chimp with the IQ of a sack of hammers. But if you are a good
chess player, then people will still think that you're smart.
Along with nuclear physicists and brain surgeons, great chess
players are seen as being among the intellectual giants of the
planet. This is partly because chess involves the simultaneous
use of strategy, mathematics, and risk-analysis, and partly because
the game is such a bitch to learn. But fear the chessboard no
more, for we will now teach you the basics of chess. No, we won't
teach you enough to start scamming people in Central Park, but
you'll at least be able to follow the game and make witty
comments.
We're
first gonna teach you how to set everything up and know how everything
moves before we even mention anything about strategy. But just
so that you can keep it in mind, the piece called the "king"
is the most important piece. The goal of the game is to capture
your opponent's king before your opponent captures yours.
All of the rest is just details. Your king is all that matters.
Long live the king!
|
A
chess game involves two people sitting on opposite sides of a chessboard.
A chess board looks exactly like a checkerboard. But it's not
a checkerboard. It's a chessboard. If you don't use the
proper terminology, we can just stop right now and you can go back
to your pathetic chess-less life.
Still
here? Good. First, put the board down between you and your opponent.
Just for the sake of simplicity, let's name your opponent
Moe. We want to start you off easy. In any case, feel free to
replace the word "Moe" with "Larry," "Curly"
or "Shemp," if it so suits you.
Anyway,
put the chessboard between you and Moe so that the white square
at the bottom is to your right. You can remember this by using
the catchy phrase "Right is white."
Each
player has 6 different types of chess pieces: there are 8 pawns,
2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops, 1 queen, and 1 king. The pawns
are the smallest pieces, and you will recognize them because (duh)
there are eight of them. The rooks look like tiny little castles
with jagged edges along the top. The knights look like little
horse heads. The bishops are the things with little balls on the
top (they look like Sesame Street's Grover looking up). The king
is the tallest piece and has a cross on top. The last piece is
the queen, which is the 2nd tallest piece and has a little crown
around the top.
Here's
a picture:
Now,
one player will be the white pieces, and one will be the black
pieces. The way to decide is for you to put a pawn in each hand
(black in one, white in the other), switch em around behind
your back, and then have Moe pick a hand. Whichever color pawn
Moe picks, that's the color he'll be for the game. This
might seem like a useless detail, but it's actually very
important. This is because whoever is white always makes the first
move of the game.
So,
let's say that Moe picked the hand that had a black pawn.
That means that you are the white pieces. So you'll take
your white pieces and set them up as such:
- Put
your rooks on the two outside corners of the first row.
- Next
to each rook, put a knight.
- Next
to each knight, put a bishop.
- The
queen goes on the first row on the same color box as the color
of your pieces. So if you are the black pieces, put the queen
on the remaining black, in the first row, and put the king on
the remaining white square. If you are the white pieces, put
the queen on the remaining white square and the king on black.
- Line
up all your pawns on the second row.
Was
that a tad confusing? Then here's a shortcut: the pieces
get taller as you move inwards, and the queen goes on her own
color. Your queen will always face your opponent's queen.
Same thing goes for the king. In the end, assuming you are the
white pieces, your board should look like this:
Before
we scare you with scary chess terminology, heed our warning: chess
players are weirdos. And not normal weirdos, like the people who
talk to you at the bus stop, even though you are obviously not
going to respond. Chess players are proud to be among the weirdest
souls on earth. Case in point: you're not allowed to refer
to the rows and columns on a chessboard as a "row" and
a "column." You must refer to them as a "rank"
and a "file." (Perhaps the vocabulary makes them feel
mysterious and dangerous.) Here are two clues to remembering which
is which: 1) think of a file like a single file line, which you
usually think of as front-to-back, which will remind you that
the files are the columns; 2) just remember that "row"
and "rank" both begin with an R.
And
just in case things weren't complicated enough, each rank has
a number and each file has a letter, so that everybody can follow
what's going on. For example, your knight is in box b1 (you have
another one in h1). Moe's king is on e8. You always list the rank,
then the file. If you find this difficult to remember, think of
the game Battleship: you call out "B3," not "3B."
Illustrations provided by Julie
Yu Chin Liu and are © 2000, SoYouWanna.com, Inc.
|
Go
on to Step 2: KNOW
HOW THE PIECES MOVE --> |
|
|