Learn Chess — Complete Guides for Every Piece and Rule

Everything you need to start playing chess: piece movement, rules, openings, and strategy.

Learning chess starts with two things: how each piece moves, and how the game ends (checkmate). Once you know those, everything else is pattern recognition — and ChessLvl's guides are designed to give you those patterns as fast as possible.

The six chess pieces

Chess has six piece types, each with a distinct movement pattern:

• Pawn — moves one square forward, captures diagonally. First move can be two squares.
• Knight — L-shaped movement (2+1). The only piece that jumps over others.
• Bishop — diagonal movement, any distance. Stays on its starting color.
• Rook — horizontal and vertical movement, any distance.
• Queen — combines rook and bishop movement. The most powerful piece.
• King — one square in any direction. The piece you must protect.

The rules of chess

Beyond piece movement, chess has three special rules every player must know: castling (a king-and-rook combined move that protects the king), en passant (a rare pawn capture), and promotion (a pawn reaching the 8th rank becomes a queen). Learn all three on the Rules of Chess page.

Openings and strategy

Once you know how pieces move and how the game ends, the next step is openings — the first 6-10 moves that shape every game. ChessLvl has interactive walkthroughs for 8 popular openings including the Italian Game, Sicilian Najdorf, Caro-Kann, and Queen's Gambit Declined.