How To End The game
While trying to close out the game, your goal must be to capture the king. King is the game itself. Whether accidentally or planned, taking your opponents king will end the game. That is why inventors of this game came up with some precautions so the game does not end by an accident. Whenever the king is threatened he gets a warning, which is saying “check”. This warning allows the king to move out of the danger.
For example, in this scenario white is threatening check with C-4 bishop. Which is protected by the queen while bishop is attacked by E-5 black knight. Here white has the upper hand with queen and the positioning of the rook. E-1 rook can capture black knight if he doesn’t move to F-7, which will open the center for white to maneuver.
Here Black is attacking white with D-3 knight making a check. In this case white has only one option. He can only capture knight with D-1 rook because F column is protected with F-8 rook, and 2nd column is protected by A-2 rook. After D-1 rook captures D-3 and C-4 captures D-3 the game is basically over for white.
Surviving a Check
There are only 3 ways to survive a check.
- Capturing the attacker
- Relocating the king
- Blocking the way of the attacker
First way is generally the best one because, taking the piece that is in the position to check is a valuable piece for the attacking part. By taking that piece you are not only removing the threat, you are also taking that square back. In a game that you play to win, hitting two birds with one stone is always a good strategy.
Capturing the Attacker
Here, black is being checked by H-5 queen and F-6 knight is able to capture the queen by moving to H-5. This will remove the queen from the board and since queen has no protection, black will not lose his knight as an exchange.
Relocating the king
As simple as it seems, sometimes just moving the king away from the dangerous square is the best option. In this example black has no pawn in the G-7 square, so there is no piece to block the way of queen. He has to move his king to F-8, to safety.
Blocking the way of the attacker
White is gambling in this example. He is looking to make check mate in 4 moves by moving F-1 bishop to C-4 to protect the F-7 square when queen attacks. But black can move the G-7 pawn to G-6 to block queens path and completely mitigate the development of whites gambit.
!Attention!
Its worth mentioning that any chess game can end in a draw which is called “stalemate”. Stalemate happens if there is a move that finishes the game but there is no check. This happens because in chess you can not move the king to a place that he will be checked/attacked.
Check mate!
Here, white has a check mate by checking the G-8 black king with B-8 rook. Black king can not move to G-7 because white bishop on H-6 is targeting that square. So white has rendered black king helpless and under attack. Check Mate!
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