4 Player Chess Teams - The Basics

i know the thumbnail sucks but i honestly dont care

I think teams is way easier to learn and understand than FFA, which is ironic because there are way more FFA players that are above 2500 than there are teams players above 2200...but let's not forget rating inflation

4pc teams also helped me a lot with learning how to calculate and seeing long distance attacks. It also helps with tactics and endgame play overall. So if you suck at regular chess...4pc does help a bit. And if you think you're bad at teams...first off, this guide is for you! But secondly, you always have a partner to help you out during the game. And don't worry! There is no playing for 3rd or 6v1 usa teamers! Or people that claim of you harassing their 8-year-old daughter?

The Rules

1. The game is played as a team; your teammate is the player across from you.
2. The game ends by checkmate if and only if it is the checkmated player's turn. This can lead to situations where the checkmate can be "invalidated" by that player's teammate. More on that later.
3. Promotion, unlike in FFA, is on the 11th rank, not the 8th. So if you reach an endgame, make sure that you can actually promote your pawn before pushing it, as otherwise, you might run into your partner's pawn and get blocked from promoting.

And that's about it lol

Strategies, Tactics, and How to Actually Play

Tactics here are similar to those that you'd see in regular chess, however some are more prominent and some barely show up at all. Here are some common tactics (not including checkmates or checkmate patterns; those will come up later):

• Checks (one player attacks an enemy king while their teammate takes advantage of the check to win material or improve their position)
• Pins
• Discovered Checks/King Captures
• Other move order tactics

Some of these are more complicated than others. Move order, I find, is something that many newer or even intermediate players struggle to grasp. You don't immediately have to capture a piece if you can; in certain situations, in fact, it might be a bad choice to immediately capture or give a check just because you can (just like in regular chess, except here it's more complicated).

Take the following position, for example:

Both Red and Yellow can capture the pawn with their queen. However, if Yellow captures, he gets checkmated (Green plays Qxh13+ followed by Blue's Qxg12#—a common double queen checkmate). So instead, Yellow can simply move the queen back to g13 to prevent the checkmate, and instead let Red capture the pawn (unless, of course, Green defends it first). Also, this was just an example—usually it's not a good idea to capture pawns like that since you're opening up the enemy rook without any good compensation other than winning a pawn. But hopefully you can make sense of the idea of move order tactics.

Certain ideas can seem deceptively simple yet are much more complicated than they look. For example, material imbalances play a big role at the higher levels. You will commonly see players sacrifice material in the hopes of an attack on the king, or trading a few pieces for a queen. Depending on the dynamic of the position, the strategic choices will definitely vary. But in general, you probably shouldn't sacrifice more than 2-3 pieces (stay within being down 7-10 points of material). And even then, only sacrifice material if you know that you have an attack going and still have chances to win. Usually being down a knight or bishop isn't that bad, but being down multiple pieces can lead to an inevitable loss.

Unlike in regular 2 player chess, you can more often than not sacrifice a queen for two or three pieces and not be at a major disadvantage. One common tactic is the sacrifice on the weak queen's knight, which opens up diagonals to the king and allows further tactical ideas.

The knight is only defended by a pawn, and green is ready to recapture that pawn with a check and a fork on the rook. Blue is also threatening to win the queen back by playing d10, so red has to sacrifice the knight on d4 to threaten a check on blue with Nxb5+ so that he doesn't have time to attack the yellow queen by playing d10. This kind of sacrifice sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, so it's always a good idea to do some calculation before executing it.

The Opening

Ah yes. Openings.

When it comes to openings, you have a lot less freedom (unless you're green, then EVEN less) than you might have in regular chess. And that might seem weird because it seems like there are way more openings because there are more players and more space to move pieces. But here me out when I say that the openings are basically forced. There's only so many decent options that don't lose in 5 moves or less.

However, once you get out of the opening, it becomes a vastly complex game. Usually you're out of theory within 5 moves. Or, as I said earlier, you get mated within those 5 moves. Your choice.

You kind of just have to adapt and start developing pieces naturally. Bring the knights out, develop the queen early, open diagonals, and get a head start on attacking. These are all perfectly viable setups, but as mentioned earlier, green has a little less flexibility than the other colors since he moves last and has to deal with attacks from red and yellow. 

Usually as red you have the most freedom (since you move first), so you can play 1. f3, 1. f4, 1. g4, 1. h4, 1. h3, etc. Usually people either play 1. f3 or 1. h3. and then go from there.

The Middlegame

Tactics mainly play a role in the middlegame, though some positional play can also be observed in higher level games. For this section, I thought it would be better to show some specific examples—puzzles of sorts—from real games rather than make up my own because there are just so many possibilities.

Here's one: https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess/game/49495919/46/3

Red and Yellow are up material, but it looks like Red is about to lose his queen and maybe even get checkmated. The green queen may look scary, but Yellow has a tactic that saves the game for them. Can you find it? Answer: Bxl6, allowing Green to capture Red's queen but threatening Nh2 from Red with Yellow's Bxm7+, a move order tactic that allows RY to win back the queen

This sequence of moves was actually played in the game (but unfortunately we ended up throwing—lost by one tempo!—and I resigned).

Here's another example: https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess/game/43617291/76/1

Try to find the forced checkmate. (I myself missed it, but my partner found it—another reason why this game is very cool!) Answer: Rn7+ followed by Rn5, blocking Green's rook from capturing Red's rook, also creating a battery/double stack/whatever you want to call it that allows Red to sneak into the n11 square for checkmate

This is an example of how quickly a game can turn around from being equal to losing to forced checkmate in a few moves, which only adds to the thrill and dynamic nature of 4pc teams.

Note that this position isn't quite an endgame because there are still quite a few pieces on the board (which closely adheres to the "definition" of a regular 2 player chess endgame). Think of it as a queenless middlegame.

The Endgame

By far one of the more complicated parts of the game, the teams endgame isn't always like the average 2 player chess endgame you're used to. While many elements are similar, such as your average king and pawn or rook endgame, the ideas are slightly different. For example, because there are two kings on a team, you can technically—emphasis on technically—force a checkmate with just a bishop or just a knight, but the conditions necessary to perform such a checkmate are quite rare—similar to the two knights checkmate in regular chess. So it's just regarded as insufficient material. (Oh yeah, standard chess drawing rules apply here, such as threefold-repetition, the 50-move-rule, and stalemate).

But otherwise, endgames in teams are pretty much the same as those in regular chess. One exception is that pawns promote on the 11th rank, so you can accidentally block your teammate from ever promoting his pawn. Which is not fun.

Red can't promote his pawn because Yellow's pawn is on Red's 11th rank. However, Yellow can still promote his pawn. F in the comments for Red

Here's an example of a complex endgame played by some people that doesn't include me for once: https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess/game/47120154/106/1

Compare and Contrast: 4PC Teams vs Regular Chess

What makes teams so exciting is that the dynamics of the position are always changing. An idea that may not be possible on one move might be possible on the next. But it is also really helpful for improving your skills in regular chess. Because the board is bigger (160 squares instead of 64), long-range pieces can move much farther, and hence this can help your board vision and recognizing which pieces can move where. It makes it even easier on the smaller board that regular chess is played on. The tactical patterns in teams also helped me with pattern recognition and calculation, which in turn helped me with puzzles and ultimately becoming better at spotting unique sacrifices and winning ideas in a regular chess position.

Conclusion

Overall, teams is a very interesting game. You should definitely try it out (I hope this was convincing enough of a blog!) if you have time. Not only is it a fun game to play, it is different from chess in ways that make it relaxing (and thrilling at the same time) to not be playing the same boring game over and over, but it is similar enough that you can use it as a tool to improve. And if you're ever scared of entering a teams game with someone you don't know, don't worry, you can always invite a teammate to help you out

Quick plug:

As a community, we variants players are trying to work on becoming bigger and reaching out to a wider audience. If you're interested in helping us grow our community, feel free to join the official 4 Player Chess and (Custom) Variants clubs, as well as a club I recently created to further fuel our quest to get Variants alive again. Due to the merge of 4PC with Variants, we faced server issues, missing/broken features, and more problems that led to us losing a lot of our playerbase. We have since recovered technically but not popularity, so we're hoping to introduce a lot of new folks to the game and hopefully bring it back to the level of fun it once was.

But before we end off, to hopefully spark your interests even more, here's a super funny game that ended in the most legendary stalemate I've ever seen. No spoilers! Replay the game from the beginning!

https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chess/game/5097769/0/1

Thanks for reading!