The Touch-Move Rule

In formal over-the-board chess, if you deliberately touch one of your own pieces, you must move it if it has any legal move available. Touch an opponent's piece and it's capturable, and you must capture it if that capture is legal. If the touched piece genuinely has no legal move or capture available, there's no penalty at all. Once you place a piece on a new square and let go of it, that move is final and can't be taken back, even if you immediately realize it was a mistake.

If you need to straighten a piece on its square without being bound to move it, the accepted etiquette is to announce "j'adoube," French for "I adjust," before touching it. The French phrase is understood internationally, though a local-language equivalent like simply saying "adjusting" is usually accepted too. A player may not touch any piece on the board during the opponent's turn, and a touch-move claim must be made before the claiming player touches a piece themselves.

Online chess generally works differently: most platforms let you pick a piece up and set it back down on its original square before choosing a different one, since there's no physical piece to commit to. A few official platforms, including FIDE's own online arena, do enforce a version of touch-move by locking in the first piece selected.

Algebraic Notation

Algebraic notation is the standard way to write down chess moves, letting any game ever recorded be read, replayed, and studied by anyone who knows the system. It was first introduced by Philippe Stamma in his 1745 book on chess, and it has since become the universal standard, replacing older systems like descriptive notation almost everywhere.

Every square on the board gets a unique label: a letter for the file (a through h, left to right from White's side) and a number for the rank (1 through 8, bottom to top from White's side). The square in White's bottom-right corner, for example, is h1.

A move is written as the piece's letter followed by its destination square: Nf3 means a knight moves to f3. Pawns are the one exception; they have no letter at all, so a pawn move is written as just the destination square, like e4. Captures add an "x" before the destination square, so Bxe5 means a bishop captures whatever's on e5, and exd5 means a pawn on the e-file captures on d5. Other symbols round out the system: "+" for check, "#" for checkmate, "O-O" and "O-O-O" for kingside and queenside castling, and "=" followed by a piece letter for promotion, such as e8=Q.

Piece Letters

King is K, Queen is Q, Rook is R, Bishop is B, and Knight is N (not K, since that's already taken by the king). Pawns, as noted above, use no letter at all.

Try It Yourself

Notation makes the most sense once you see it applied to a real sequence. Load this position, reached after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5, into the analyzer and follow along with the moves that got it there:

Analyze this notated opening sequence →

Or set up any position from your own games on the chess analyzer, then try writing down the moves that follow in algebraic notation as practice.

This position is actually the very start of the Ruy Lopez, one of the oldest and most enduring openings in chess.