Can pawns ever move diagonally without a capture? or is this puzzle just wrong

Look at the opponent's previous move. The solution is to make an en passant capture.

(Please don't listen to anyone who turns up in this thread to say that en passant is forced, that's just a meme)

It's a special move in chess you can only make with your pawn on the turn immediately after your opponent moved their pawn 2 squares to bypass you being able to capture it with your pawn. If you play a different move on your turn, you're not allowed to capture the pawn like that anymore, so it has to be immediate.

The other special move in chess is called castling, which gets your king to safety in a corner and brings either rook to the middle, it can only be played if the king and the chosen rook haven't moved at all yet in that game and there are no pieces left in the squares between king and rook.

yes you dont have to play en peasent unless its your only legal move

but dont castle if your king has no protection in front of it on either side

Or you can resign in that situation

I did once see a forced en passant checkmate where en passant was the only legal move and the next move was mate. Think it was in a Gotham video?

Gotham Chess is great, you can learn a lot from him.

I wish he would focus less on openings for beginners. I understand he wants to sell courses and there's a lot of (unwise) demand for openings content amongst beginners, but when I was in his target viewer rating bracket I would have really appreciated more practical videos on calculation, mating patterns, coming up with a plan out of the opening, what to look out for so you know when to go for an attack on the enemy king, etc.

I don't think anyone has answered Miranda22's question - I was trying to find an answer to the same question - the puzzle told me to move my pawn diagonally when there was no piece in the square to capture - that's not en passant is it?

Holy hell

Google en passant

Do the one legal move and en passant.