You should only be allowed to promote a pawn with a piece that has been captured

Let's just keep all the rules we already have. If you want to play with different rules find a friend who will play a variant with you.

If you have no extra pieces and upsidedown rook looks silly. All good sets have extra queens including the public giant set at Hastings. Before the laws were changed 400 years ago one played by the Spanish or Italian rules which differed only in this respect.

Another stupid moron on chess.com.

Yes, GMs, IMs, FMs, Experts (like me), A-Players, B-Players, etc, basically anybody above the level of ineptitude, would mind.

There are games with multiple Queens for both sides.  There was a famous one, can't recall the players.  I want to say Capablanca and Alekhine, but don't quote me on that.  I've needed a third knight before.

Plus, smartypants, what do I do if I promote and none of my pieces are captured yet?  All you've taken of mine are pawns!

And what about players that play that famous line of the Semi-Slav (not considered very good for Black) where both sides promote via Rook captures, where White plays gxh8=Q and Black plays bxa1=Q?

Another dumb thread started up by a dumb person.

What about this position?

that is some cool info that I was not aware of, thanks.

thanks for honouring my light-hearted thread with putting in the effort of creating a funny situation. But how could that one become reality in a game?

Errm, calm down. This is meant to be light hearted as you should be able to guess from my original post. No need to get insulting here. If you are not into light hearted discussion, do not join in.

Games exist were the pawns promote before the queens are taken, I am aware of that. I know that there are tiny problems with my proposal, but I also believe that if these were the rules of chess, you guys would probably object to the idea to always being able to get a queen.  

So relax,  my little idea will never become reality, I will not impose my ideas on anyone.  

at our school we always looked for a good sacrifice before promoting - we had no chess club only our own pocket sets - if only we had known!

Regarding having to "rush to meet the kid's demand", there is a common misconception that if my opponent promotes a pawn, I must be the one to replace the pawn with the new piece.  Nonsense!  It is totally up to the person promoting to produce the new piece (but, importantly, the promoter does have the right to stop the chess clock while finding that piece).  If my opponent pushes a pawn to the last rank and says "queen me!", I gently remind him/her that we are not playing checkers.

Under current rules, if I could sac any non queen to safely promote I would do it. Only being able to promote to a piece that was already captured wouldn't change this. In fact, since you can couldn't promote to a queen unless yours was already lost, you would probably see less of these kinds of attacks.

Do you have any idea at all how such a pointless change would disrupt the publishing world? All past and present books for beginners (thousands of titles  in hundreds of languages) would be made redundant. 

Pretty excellent point.

Part of the appeal of chess is that it is the same game in practically the entire world and has remained the same for hundreds of years.  It has some weird rules (e.g. stalemate if no legal move), but creating a Chess 2015 rulebook that changes any of them is extraordinarily impractical.

yes people should forget all these silly ideas of wanting to change the rules of chess

sorry but I think that this idea is not good!!!!!!

Might be interesting if a pawn could promote to a draughts/checkers "king"..

I'm tempted to start a thread "Isn't it about time the board was positioned with the  light square in the left hand corner ?"

Let's go ahead with making this change. And let's add lasers and dinosaurs too. Soon chess will be better than ever!

To the OP: Surely the kids can be more innovative than that: when I was a kid, we'd often turn a taken rook upside-down and call it a queen. You can put a hat on the pawn. If you've got draughts pieces, use one of them, or a pile of them, maybe with the pawn on top. There are endless options! So long as both players know it's a queen, you don't need an actual queen piece.

wow, after 3 pages no one mentioned that this rule was already in effect in the past?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_%28chess%29

for example:

In Italy in the 18th and early 19th century, the pawn could only be promoted to a piece that had already been captured. Likewise, Philidor did not like the possibility of having two queens, and in all editions of his book (1749 to 1790) he stated that a promotion could only be to a piece previously captured. Lambe also stated this rule in a 1765 book (Davidson 1981:60–61). If none of the promoting player's pieces had yet been captured, the pawn remained inactive until one of the player's pieces was captured, whereupon the pawn immediately assumed that role (Staunton 1848:7). A player could thus never have two queens, three knights, three rooks, or three bishops (Staunton 1848:7). One old set of chess rules said that "a promoted pawn became a ferz, with the move of the queen".

The restricted promotion rule was used unevenly. Arthur Saul published a book in 1814 which gave the unrestricted promotion rule, as did Jacob Sarratt in an 1828 book. By Sarratt's time, the unrestricted promotion was popular, and according to Davidson it was universal by the mid-19th century (Davidson 1981:61). However, Howard Staunton wrote in The Chess-Player's Handbook, originally published in 1847, that according to Carl Jaenisch the restricted promotion rule then remained in force in northern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, and Germany (Staunton 1848:7).

lol, no I didnt. Now that I read it I faintly remember that I have read this before. Often, ideas are just stuff that you faintly remember.

Quite weird that I get that much attention here. Please remember that this is meant to be light hearted. But I do believe that chess would be ok with that rule. As the example above shows, the rules have changed. Older books still remaining useful.