How to Make Basic Moves in Chess

Video Transcript

"My name is Mike Powell and I'm here at the Chess Forum to introduce some basic moves in chess or the basic way chess is played. If you look at chess, the most important piece in chess is the king. The king can only move one square at a time. And part of what this game is about is something that goes back to ancient history. In either east or west, in ancient times, the king actually did come out to the battlefield and he would sit on a lawn chair. You can see this in a movie called "Kaji Mosha". So, the king would sit on a lawn chair and that's basically one of the principle ideas in chess. The objective in chess is to dominate the opposing king, not necessarily to capture the king, but to dominate the king. And so, one of the first things you try to do in a chess game is surround or attack the king in such a way that you can dominate and create a position where he is in check and cannot move. And that's done with the other pieces. The next most important piece in chess is the queen. The queen can move diagonally in any direction it wants. It can move vertically and horizontally. In ancient times, this was not referred to as the queen. It was referred to as fez or the field marshal. And so, that's one of the essential elements of chess. You don't want to come out too early with your field marshal because he's an easy target. Everybody wants to be a hero and it would be good to be able to capture the field marshal. Now, the next piece that's next to the queen and king is the bishop. In ancient Arabian countries, the bishop was referred to as the elephant, but in modern times, it has a different approach, a different function altogether and it moves in a different way. The bishop is like a king in checkers. That is, you have a light square bishop and a dark square bishop. They move along the diagonals anywhere they want up to where there's an opposing piece. But they cannot go over their own pieces. The only piece that can do that is called the knight. And in chess, the knight is the eyes of the army -- something that Robert E. Lee used to say. So, if I move forward, the knight moves in a sort of L-shape. And with children, we try and say, "Step, step, side," or "Step, step, side." So, it moves in an L-shape. And one of the things that Germans say about that movement is that they call it a grasshopper. So, when a knight comes out, it's all right for the knight to probe an enemy or opposing position, because if the opponent takes a pawn and threatens the knight, which I just move the knight away, the knight is always going to a different color."