How to Play Chess
Play chess from the first move. Set up the board, move each piece, castle, capture en passant, promote a pawn, and tell checkmate from stalemate and the other draws.
You will end up able to set up the board, move every piece, use castling, en passant, and promotion, tell checkmate from a draw, and play a full game with a few opening principles and four basic tactics. The aim is to checkmate the opponent's king, which means attacking it in a way that leaves the opponent no legal move.
Steps 1 to 4 are the rules, checked against the Laws of Chess that FIDE, the International Chess Federation, put into effect on January 1, 2023 (linked in step 3). Steps 5 to 7 are advice on how to play well, not rules.
You do not need a physical board to start. Lichess is free and lets you play against the computer or against other people, and FAQ 3 below compares it with Chess.com.
A chess set, physical or digital. To learn, use a site or app such as Lichess, because it accepts only legal moves, which helps while you are still memorizing how the pieces move. For a physical game, any standard set works.
Set up the board correctly
Place the board so that each player has a white (light) square in the near right-hand corner. Set the pieces on the two rows nearest each player. On the back row, White's pieces run rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook from White's left to right. Black's back row mirrors it, so each black piece faces the white piece of the same kind across the board. Check the queens. Each queen stands on a square of her own color, the white queen on a light square and the black queen on a dark one. The eight pawns fill the row in front of the pieces. White moves first, and the players then take turns. Squares are named by coordinates. The columns, called files, are lettered a to h from White's left to right, and the rows, called ranks, are numbered 1 to 8 starting from White's side, so the white king starts on e1 and the black king on e8.
Learn how each piece moves
The king moves one square in any direction, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. The queen moves any number of squares along a rank, a file, or a diagonal, so she combines the rook and the bishop. The rook moves any number of squares along a rank or a file. The bishop moves any number of squares along a diagonal, which keeps each bishop on the color it started on for the whole game. The queen, rook, and bishop cannot move over a piece that stands in their way. The knight moves in an L shape, two squares along a rank or file and then one square to the side. It is the only piece that jumps over other pieces. A pawn moves straight forward one square onto an empty square, and on its first move it has the option of two squares if both are empty. A pawn captures differently from how it moves. It takes one square diagonally forward and never straight ahead. No piece can move onto a square held by a piece of its own color. A piece that moves onto a square held by an enemy piece captures it, and the captured piece comes off the board. A pawn that reaches the far end of the board must be promoted in the same move to a queen, rook, bishop, or knight of its own color. You are not limited to pieces that have been captured, so a second queen is legal. Choose the queen, the most powerful piece, unless another piece wins on the spot.
Understand check, checkmate, and stalemate
Check means the king is under attack, which is to say an enemy piece could capture it on the next move. You must answer a check at once, and there are three ways: move the king to a square that is not attacked, block the attack with another piece, or capture the attacking piece. No other move is legal. For the same reason, you can never make a move that leaves or puts your own king in check. Checkmate means the king is in check and no move gets it out. The game ends, and the player who delivered checkmate wins. Stalemate means the player to move has no legal move and is not in check. It is a draw, not a loss, and it ends the game immediately. Watch for it when you are far ahead. Before each move, confirm that your opponent will still have a legal move, unless your move is checkmate. The FIDE laws list the other ways a game is drawn. The players can agree to a draw. A dead position, in which neither side can checkmate by any series of legal moves, such as king against king, ends the game automatically. Two more draws have to be claimed by the player whose turn it is. One is threefold repetition, the same position appearing for the third time with the same player to move. The other is the fifty-move rule, which is 50 moves by each player, not 50 in total, with no pawn move and no capture. Left unclaimed, the game goes on, and it becomes a draw automatically only at the fifth repetition or after 75 such moves by each player.
Learn the two special moves: castling and en passant
Castling is the one move that moves two pieces. The king moves two squares toward a rook that is still on its starting square, and that rook moves to the square the king just crossed. It takes your king toward a corner and brings the rook into play. You can castle only if four conditions hold. Neither the king nor that rook has moved before, no piece stands between them, the king is not in check, and the king does not cross or land on an attacked square. A king that has moved can never castle. A check or an attacked square prevents castling only for as long as it lasts. En passant is a pawn capture. When an enemy pawn advances two squares from its starting square and lands directly beside one of your pawns, your pawn can capture it as though it had advanced only one square. Your pawn moves diagonally to the square the enemy pawn skipped, and the enemy pawn comes off the board. The capture is legal only on your very next move. After that the right is gone. The effect is that a pawn cannot use its two-square first move to slip past an enemy pawn.
Follow basic opening principles
In the opening, the first moves of the game while the pieces are still coming out, follow five principles. Control the center of the board with pawns and pieces. The four center squares are d4, d5, e4, and e5, and a piece in the center or aimed at it reaches more squares than a piece on the edge. Move your knights and bishops out early, which is called development. Castle early to protect your king. Do not move the same piece twice in the opening unless you are forced to. Do not bring your queen out early, because less valuable pieces can chase her around while your opponent develops. Once the knights, bishops, and queen have left the back rank and the king has castled, the rooks protect each other along it, which is called connecting the rooks. For a first opening as White, move the e-pawn two squares (e4), bring the knights to f3 and c3, bring the king's bishop to c4, and castle on the king's side. Then move the d-pawn one square (d3), which lets the other bishop out. Before each of those moves, check that the square is safe and that nothing of yours is under attack, because your opponent's moves can change the plan.
Good to know: Give every move a purpose: develop a piece, control the center, create a threat, or answer one. If you cannot say what a move does, look for one that does one of those four things.
Learn basic tactics to win material
Tactics are short sequences that win pieces or deliver checkmate. Learn four of them first. A fork attacks two pieces at once with a single piece. If your opponent can save only one, you capture the other. Knights fork well, because a knight attacks a queen, rook, or bishop from a square where that piece cannot attack it back. A pin holds a piece in place because moving it would expose a more valuable piece behind it. When a bishop pins a knight to the king, the knight cannot legally move at all, since moving would put its own king in check. A skewer is a reverse pin. You attack a valuable piece, and when it moves, you capture the less valuable piece behind it. A discovered attack happens when you move one piece out of the way and reveal an attack from the piece behind it. If the piece you moved makes a threat of its own, your opponent has two threats to answer with one move. Look for these four patterns before each move, for both sides.
Know the value of pieces and trade wisely
Players count material with a conventional point scale. A pawn is worth 1 point, a knight or bishop 3, a rook 5, and a queen 9. The king has no point value, because it cannot be captured and the game ends with checkmate. These points are not in the rules and do not decide who wins. They tell you whether a trade is good. Giving up a bishop (3) for a rook (5) gains 2 points, and giving up a rook (5) for a knight (3) loses 2. An even trade is worth making when it improves your position. Trade pieces when you are ahead in material, because fewer pieces make an advantage easier to convert into checkmate, and avoid trades when you are behind, because you need pieces to create threats. The values are approximate. A well-placed knight can be worth more than a passive bishop. Before every move, scan the board for undefended pieces, both yours and your opponent's. Ask two questions. Can my opponent capture anything I left unprotected? Did my opponent leave anything unprotected that I can capture? Make this check a habit before you learn any opening by name.
Play your first games against a computer opponent on the easiest setting it offers, then play other people. If you forget how a piece moves mid-game, go back to step 2. If you keep losing pieces for nothing, run the two-question check from step 7 before every move. If a game you were winning ends in a draw, reread the stalemate rule in step 3. FAQ 4 below covers how to practice between games. When you move on to a club or a tournament, the FIDE laws add rules for the physical board, including the touch-move rule. A piece you deliberately touch on your turn is the piece you must move, if it has a legal move.
Questions we get asked about this
Answers from experience, not a textbook.
We could not find a study that times it, so measure progress by checkpoints instead of weeks. The first is finishing a game without looking up a rule. The second is finishing a game without leaving a piece where it can be taken for free (step 7). The third is winning material with one of the four tactics in step 6. Your rating tracks the rest. Lichess, for example, starts every new player at 1500 with a wide margin of uncertainty and says the rating swings by large amounts over the first games, then settles as you play more. Judge it over many games, not one.
Not yet. Play the opening from step 5 as White in every game. As Black, answer e4 by moving your own e-pawn two squares (e5), then follow the same five principles. Playing the same first moves every game makes the early positions familiar. Start on named openings once the step 7 check has stopped you from losing pieces for free.
Start on Lichess, because nothing on it is paid. Its feature list gives a free account zero advertising, unlimited tactics puzzles, and all of its lessons on the basics of chess, and says every feature is free for everybody. Lichess follows the FIDE rules, so a threefold repetition has to be claimed, and it shows a button for that when the position repeats. Chess.com describes itself as the world's largest chess community and offers bots to play against, lessons, and puzzles. Its Premium plans add unlimited puzzles, unlimited lessons, unlimited game review, and no ads.
No one kind of practice replaces the others. Three kinds each train something different, so do all three every week. Play games, which is where you practice the opening principles and the check before each move. Solve tactics puzzles, which train you to spot forks, pins, skewers, and discovered attacks. Review your losses, to find the move where you lost material and what the step 7 check would have shown you.