The pawn

Of the sixteen chessmen each side starts with, half are pawns. The pawn is the weakest piece, the slowest, and it never goes back: it has no step backwards. But only a pawn that reaches the last rank can turn into another piece, most often a queen.

The last chapter left a question open: can a king catch a pawn that runs for the last rank? To answer it you need to know everything about the pawn. So we will walk with one pawn the whole way, rank by rank. At the start it learns to step two squares, on the way to capture diagonally and to catch an enemy pawn in passing, and on the last rank it changes into another piece. At the end of the chapter we stage a race between a pawn and a king.

The second rank: one step or two

A pawn moves only forward, along its file, one square at a time. White pawns go up, towards the eighth rank, and black pawns go down, towards the first. A pawn never moves sideways or backwards.

There is one exception, and the start gives it. A pawn that has not moved yet and stands on its starting rank (the second for White, the seventh for Black) may go two squares on its first move. It may, but it need not: the player chooses, e2–e3 or e2–e4. You made this move already in the first chapter. After that the pawn goes one square at a time again, right to the end.

The double step exists to get the game going faster. The move e2–e4 puts a pawn in the centre in a single move and opens the road for the queen and the bishop on f1. Black does the same in mirror image: its starting rank is the seventh, and the double step looks like e7–e5.

A pawn cannot jump, and it cannot capture what stands straight in front of it. If any piece, yours or the enemy's, stands on the square ahead, the pawn will not go forward. Two pawns that have run into each other on one file, like e4 and e5 in many games, stay like that until one of them is removed or one of them finds something to capture. For the double step both squares must be free: a pawn cannot pass through a piece on the third rank to reach the fourth.

Diagonally: a pawn captures differently from how it moves

For all the pieces you know so far, capturing looks like moving: a rook captures along its line, a knight with a jump. The pawn is the exception we warned about in the second chapter. It moves straight, but it captures diagonally forward: on a neighbouring square on the diagonal, to the left or to the right. A white pawn on e4 attacks d5 and f5. A black pawn on e5 attacks d4 and f4: its "forward" is down.

Capturing with a pawn pays: it is worth the least, and if it takes a piece you come out ahead even when the pawn is taken in return. Find the best capture yourself. Click on the pawn and the board will show where it can go.

Three things follow from the pawn attacking diagonally, and you will use them in every game. First: a piece standing right in front of an enemy pawn is safe from it, though it blocks the pawn's way. Second: pawns defend one another diagonally. White pawns on b2, c3 and d4, standing like a staircase, hold each other up, and only the rear one, b2, has no defender. The chapter on pawn structure deals with such chains. And third: a king does not step onto a square that an enemy pawn attacks, humble as the pawn is.

A pawn attack threatens more than a king. A piece placed diagonally in front of an enemy pawn can be lost to it. The black pawn is the easiest to overlook, because for it everything is upside down.

The pawn has another attack worth fearing. A pawn is worth the least, so when it attacks a knight or a rook, the piece almost always has to move. And if a pawn attacks two pieces at once, only one of them has time to get away. A blow at two targets is called a fork, and chapter 11 is about it. Here the fork is made by the double step.

Pawns are slow and cheap, and that is exactly why they decide so much. A piece can go away and come back, but a pawn move cannot be taken back: each one changes, for a long time, which squares are yours and which are your opponent's. In 1749 the French chess player and composer François-André Danican Philidor wrote in the preface to his book that pawns are the soul of chess: they alone create both attack and defence, and whether a game is won or lost depends on whether they stand well or badly. The course returns to this idea in the chapters on strategy.

The fifth rank: en passant

The double step gave the pawn speed, but it opened a loophole. Let a white pawn stand on e5 and a black pawn on d7. If the black pawn goes to d6, the white pawn takes it. But what if it goes straight to d5? It slips past d6, a square that the pawn on e5 attacks, and lands next to it, safe. The rules leave no such loophole: the pawn on e5 may take it as if Black had moved only one square. The white pawn lands on d6 and the black pawn is removed from d5. This is called en passant, French for "in passing": the black pawn was caught as it went by.

En passant is the rarest and most confusing rule of the pawn. But a player who does not know it will one day decide that the opponent has made an impossible move. So here are all three of its conditions.

• Only a pawn captures, and only a pawn is captured.
• The enemy pawn has just moved two squares and landed next to yours, on the same rank. So a white pawn captures from the fifth rank, and a black pawn from the fourth.
• You can capture only at once, on your very next move. If you do not, the right is gone for good.

Where does such a strange rule come from? In the old game the pawn moved only one square. The double step appeared in Europe sometime between the 13th and 16th centuries, to get a game going faster, and it brought a loophole: a pawn learned to slip past an enemy pawn. En passant closed that loophole. It is recorded already in the 1561 book of the Spanish master Ruy López, while in Italy players were allowed to slip past for a long time, and en passant became the general rule there only in 1880.

En passant, like any other capture, is optional. Chapter 7 explains how such a capture is marked in a game record.

The purpose of the rule is clearest when a pawn tries to slip past and run away. If you do not catch it now, you never will.

The eighth rank: promotion

When a pawn reaches the last rank (the eighth for a white pawn, the first for a black one), it changes into another piece on that same move. The player removes the pawn from the board and puts on that square a queen, rook, bishop or knight of their own colour, as they choose. This is promotion. A pawn cannot stay a pawn, and it cannot become a king. The choice does not depend on what has already been captured: you can get a second queen while the first is still on the board. The new piece acts at once: if it attacks the king right away, that is check.

That is why a pawn that has come close to the last rank is worth far more than one point: the opponent sees an almost-queen in it and throws their best pieces against it. Most dangerous of all is a pawn that no enemy pawn can stop: none of them stands in its way or attacks the squares ahead of it. Such a pawn is called a passed pawn, and chapter 29 is about it.

On the board in this course, when you bring a pawn to the last rank, four pieces appear to choose from. In the record, promotion is written like this: e8=Q means the pawn came to e8 and became a queen.

Usually promotion is a long way off, and the opponent does all they can to stop it. But when a pawn already stands on the seventh rank, one move decides everything.

A pawn also promotes when it arrives on the last rank by a capture. The diagonal capture and the promotion happen in the same move.

Almost always a pawn is promoted to a queen, since no piece is stronger. Sometimes a knight is better: it attacks squares that a queen does not reach, and only it can give check with a jump. Promoting to anything but a queen is called underpromotion.

And sometimes a queen is even a mistake. A well-known position of this kind bears the name of Fernando Saavedra, a Spanish priest who lived in Glasgow. A local newspaper printed it in 1895, and the author of the column believed that Black could save the game. Saavedra found that the pawn must be promoted to a rook.

Here is the draw that White avoided. The white queen and king have taken every square from the king on a1, but there is no check, and Black has no other pieces: there is nothing to move. Such a position is called stalemate. What it is and why it is a draw is explained in chapter 5.

The race: will the king be in time

Now the answer to the question from the last chapter. A pawn runs for the last rank, and the enemy king tries to catch it. The pawn's own king is no help: it is far away. Who will make it? You can work this out without making a single move.

First count the pawn's moves to the last rank. From e4 to e8 a pawn needs four moves, and from its starting rank five, not six, because the first step can be a double one. Then count the king's moves to the promotion square as chapter 3 taught: how many files or ranks lie between it and the square, whichever is larger. And finally, look at whose move it is: while the pawn makes its moves, the king can make as many if it moves first, and one fewer if the pawn moves first. If those moves are enough for the way to the promotion square, the king stops the pawn. If it is one short, it still stops it: when the pawn becomes a queen the king will be standing next to it and will take it, since nothing defends the new queen. If it is two short or more, the pawn gets through. A black pawn is counted the same way, only downwards: from c5 to c1 it needs four moves, and from the seventh rank to the first, five.

Players also judge such races by eye, with "the rule of the square": it and other pawn endings are covered in chapter 35. But the rule is the same count of moves, only drawn on the board. Practise counting: the trainer shows a pawn and a king, and you decide who is in time.

This count has two conditions that are easy to forget. The pawn's own king must be far away: if it is close, it will shield the pawn or drive the enemy king off, and the count tells you nothing. And there must be nothing in the pawn's way: a pawn that has run into a piece goes nowhere.

And the last exercise of the chapter: catch the pawn yourself. The black pawn on c5 needs four moves to c1. The white king on g3 also needs four to c1, and you move first. So you are in time, with a move to spare. But a move away from the pawn costs more than one move.

What's next

Now you know how all six pieces move. But along the way we kept speaking of check, mate and stalemate and never explained them fully. In the promotion problem a new queen gave mate, and in the Saavedra position the same queen would have given stalemate and thrown away the win. From the first chapter you know that you get out of check by moving the king, blocking or capturing the checking piece. When each of those works, how mate differs from stalemate, and why stalemate is a draw even when one side has a queen and the other only a king, is the subject of the chapter "Check, checkmate and stalemate".