If you're thinking of taking up the game of chess there are some basics of the game that you are going to have to learn, obviously. But to become a really good chess player and possibly a master of the game, you are going to have to put in an enormous amount of time into both study of the game and play as well. All the books in the world are not going to turn you into a master chess player without actually getting into the game itself as a player. We're going to cover just the basics of the game in this article and continue with more advanced instruction as we go along.

Chess is a game played on a board, much like a checkers board. There are two colors in chess, white and black. The player in control of the white pieces goes first, always. In match play between two people they take turns between playing white and black.

There are 16 pieces for each player, consisting of, from low to high in rank, 8 pawns, 2 knights, 2 bishops, 2 rooks, 1 queen and 1 king. Each piece is actually given a value from 1 to 8. The lowest piece is the pawn with a value of 1. After the pawn is the knight and bishop with a value of 3. The way this value was reached was through calculations that a knight and bishop were each worth about 3 pawns. Since a pawn is worth 1, knights and bishops are worth 3 each. The rooks are worth 5 points or 5 pawns and the queen is worth 8 points or 8 pawns. The king has no value but is the most important piece on the board. Once the king is checkmated (more on that later) the game is over, so losing the king is actually a meaningless point.

Before we continue, there should be a comment on the knight and bishop. If you recall, in listing the pieces from low to high, the knight was listed lower than the bishop even though both are worth 3 points. In actuality and again this has been determined from years of research and study into the game, the bishop is actually believed to be worth more than 3 points in a game situation where one side has a knight and the other has a bishop and all other pieces are equal. The bishop, in this situation is believed to be worth 3.5 points.

The object of the game is to checkmate the king. This is accomplished when the king is under attack by a piece of the opposing player and in check but can make no legal moves to get his king out of check. Once this happens the opponent wins and the game is over. If the king cannot move but is the only piece on the board for one player and is not in check then the game is stalemated and a draw. In other words, nobody wins.

In the next article in this series we'll pick up with the actual movement of each piece.