Hi there! If you read my previous blog about openings, thanks a lot! Today I will be teaching you something that may sound simple and useless but it can actually turn out really useful when you are playing a game of chess! So first, let’s start with ways to win.
The first one is resignation which is when a player gives up to you and declares you win the game. You should probably not resign unless you can see a forced checkmate in a couple of moves that is obvious or if you are down like 20 points. The second one is timeout which is when a player’s time runs out on a clock and you win again UNLESS a special rule applies which I will talk about later.
The third and final one is checkmate. If you manage to checkmate your opponent (put them in a position where the king is in check and cannot escape, block or capture the checking piece).
So now let’s move on to ways to draw a game because it is the most common way for a game to end in chess. According to FIDE, a chess game can be drawn in 5 ways but in some extraordinary circumstances, the arbiter may declare the game closed and therefore drawn. So these 5 ways are each very different. The first and probably most common is draw by agreement when both players agree that neither of them have much probability to win. The second one is stalemate which is also quite common. It is when one side’s king is NOT in check but all the squares around him are checked AND the king’s army either don’t exist at all or cannot move or are pinned by enemy pieces. Here is an example:
The third way is a dead position where due to pieces no side can make any progress therefore being eternal unless one player runs out of time but it is a draw. Insufficient Material is an example of this and about insufficient material, if you run out of time but your opponent has insufficient material you still get a draw! Here is an example of a dead position:
The fourth way is draw by threefold repetition which is when the same position appears 3 times in a game and each player has the same moves. If one player could have done en passant at one of them but not at the next it does not count. The fifth and final way is the fifty-move rule. The way it works is that if both players haven’t captured an opposing piece or moved a pawn in the last fifty moves it is a draw. Here is an example:
Now we’ll move on to ways to lose. This is very simple because it is the exact opposite of ways to win. So you can lose by timeout as you can win by your opponent’s timeout, you can lose by resignation as you can win by your opponent’s resignation and you can lose by checkmate as you can win by checkmating your opponent!
I hope you enjoyed reading my blog post! Tomorrow I will publish a post about chess endgames at around 9:15 am UTC time. Bye!
