Learn Chess With Me (Part 1) by huzaifanaveed1

_{I have moved this post from my blog to Steemit Pakistan community so that more users can read it.}

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A Brief History

Chess has to be one of the most addictive games out there. There's so much enthusiasm, passion, presence of mind and intellectuality involved in this board game that it has attracted millions of players from all over the world.

It's a very competitive game. Almost every year a World Chess Championship takes place in which Chess players from all over the world participate and the winner is declared as the Grandmaster. The current world chess champion is none other than Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian beast.

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One might how and when did this game come into origination? Well there is a lot of controversies regarding this topic, I will not go into the details regarding the origination of chess but I will mention the theories that have the strongest proofs.

The history of chess goes back 1500 hundred years. It was created by an Indian King named Shahram who was introduced to this game by one of his court members as he wanted to give a rhetorical explanation of all the people living in this kingdom.

In this game he had included Pawns, Knights, Bishops, Queen and the King himself.

From India, Chess spread to Persia (Iran) and the Arabic Peninsula. The Persians were quick to adapt this game and included this in their courts. From Persia originated the two most important terms of Chess:

• Shah (Check)

• Shah Maat (Checkmate)

Check and Checkmate are terms used when the king is helpless on the chess board (battlefield) we'll learn about it in the upcoming parts.

Chess progressed through the ages and it experienced a lot of changes in it's rule but the idea behind it never changed and in 1886 the first World Chess Championship took place in which Wilhelm Steinitz was named champion.

Basics

In this series, I'll be teaching you all Chess from the very basics. How does a chess board work? How do we place the pieces on the board? How are the pieces moved and the most important thing, how does a player win? Let's start.

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Chess is played between two people. We have two sets of pieces on a chess board, out of which one is white and one is black. I am not sure why, maybe this was a racial move back in the day or maybe it doesn't have any meaning associated to it, the white team always moves first.

Each team in a game of chess (Black and White) has:

8 Pawns
2 Rooks
2 Knights
2 Bishops
1 Queen
1 King

Setting Up A Chess Board

Everything works good when it obliges to a certain set of rules. It's the similar with chess. There are a few rules associated with this beautiful game and we have to follow them.

The most important rule while setting up the chess board is to place the board rightly. If your initial step while playing this game is wrong, your whole game will end up in a mess. So below, I'll show you how to rightly place the chess board.

CORRECT ✅	WRONG ❌

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The chess board has to be set up in such a way that each player has a white box at the bottom-right corner of the board.

In these pictures above you can clearly see that the picture on the left is following this rule as the bottom right corner has a white box, thus this is the right way.

Whereas in picture on the right side, has a black box on the bottom right corner, thus it's wrong.

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The next step is the Alphabetical and Numerical order of the chess board. A chess board is divided into a horizontal alphabetical order and a vertical numerical order. In this way, we have letters A-H horizontally and numbers 1-8 vertically.

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I'll be ending the first part of Learn Chess With Me here as I believe it's sufficient for beginners to absorb the knowledge upto this point. I'll be sharing the part 2 very soon in which I will be explaining the:

• how each piece is set up on a chess board

• moves associated with each piece

• Rules of chess

If you liked this tutorial, do let me know in the comments section. If there's anything specific that you want to learn about chess, do mention it.

Something About Me

Since I am teaching you all how to play chess, it's important to mention my experience and my expertise in it. I have been playing chess since I was 6 years old, so I have 16 years of experience in it. Though I am not a pro but I learned it from my Dad and my Uncle who was a state level chess champion.

Disclaimer: All pictures used in this blog Original pictures, clicked by me.

Regards,

Huzaifa Naveed

cc: @steemcurator01 @pennsif