As we have seen in one of the previous lessons the game is decided with a Checkmate, but not every game ends with a Mate. One of the players often resigns before the actual Mate is being acomplished.
Furthermore if no legal move can be made, but the King is not checked, the game necessarily is [...]
This lesson describes a rather easy method to perform a checkmate with a single Rook.
The black King is in the centre of the board and White must force him to the side of the board. This will be done by cutting off some of the King’s escape squares with the Rook. Since the black King [...]
It is essential for chess players to know the relative value of the chess pieces in order to judge a trade of pieces.
The most commonly used values are:
1 : Pawn
3 : Knight
3 : Bishop
5 : Rook
9 : Queen
These values are based on their strength in endgames and should be handled with care. Before [...]
If you are looking for a place to study some difficult endgames the following may be of interest to you.
Using the applet on the Knowledge4IT site all of the currently published Nalimov Tablebases can be queried online (incl. 6-men databases). On this Web Query page you are able to check some of these sometimes very [...]
The Queen is a very powerful piece, but even this powerful white piece is not able to checkmate the black king by itself. The white king is needed to support the queen. This kind of endgame is very common when a player has managed to promote a pawn. Attention has to be paid to avoid [...]
