Chess Terms Every One You May Need To Know Part 2

If you made it through Part 1 and started recognizing chess terms in commentary you would have previously nodded through blankly, welcome to the next level. Part 2 goes deeper into the tactical patterns that decide games in five moves, the clock vocabulary that makes time pressure feel like a language of its own, and more! Also, we will cover a few cultural terms the chess world uses so casually that nobody ever thinks to explain them. 

More Tactical Patterns

Deflection is when you force an opponent's piece away from a square or line it needs to defend, usually by attacking something it cannot ignore. The piece moves to deal with the new threat, and the square it was guarding becomes unprotected. 

Decoy is the aggressive cousin of deflection. Instead of chasing a piece away, you lure it onto a bad square, often by sacrificing something to pull it there. Once the piece lands where you wanted it, a follow-up wins material or checkmate.

Attraction is a specific type of decoy where you force the opponent's king or a key piece onto a square where it becomes vulnerable. The classic attraction sacrifice pulls the king onto an open file where a rook is waiting.

Interference is placing a piece on a square that cuts the connection between two of the opponent's pieces at once. Less common in practical play than other tactics, but when it appears, it tends to be completely invisible to the player on the receiving end.

Overloading is when a single piece is defending two things simultaneously, and you attack both, forcing it to abandon one of them. When you recognize that your opponent's queen is the only thing holding two critical squares together, the combination almost writes itself.

X-ray attack is an indirect attack where one piece exerts pressure through another piece standing between it and the target. A rook on the same file as the opponent's king, with a piece in the middle, is already X-raying the king even before that piece moves.

Clearance is when you sacrifice or move a piece to open a line or diagonal for a more powerful piece behind it. Clearance sacrifices often look bizarre at first glance because the piece being moved appears to be doing something useful. That’s until you see what was sitting behind it, waiting for the road to clear.

Desperado is when a piece that is going to be captured anyway makes one last aggressive move before it goes, taking a piece or causing damage rather than just sitting there waiting to be taken. The piece is essentially going down fighting. 

Perpetual check is a sequence of checks that cannot be stopped, forcing a draw by repetition. A player who is losing can sometimes save the game by finding a perpetual check sequence that the opponent cannot escape. 

Refutation is a move or sequence that proves an opponent's idea is fundamentally flawed. When someone plays a novelty in a known opening, and the other player finds the refutation over the board, the whole line becomes unusable for the side that tried it.

En prise is French for "in take" and describes a piece that is undefended and available to be captured. Leaving a piece en prise is a blunder. Noticing your opponent's piece is en prise before they realize it is one of the simplest ways to win material.

Checkmate Patterns Worth Knowing

Fool's Mate is the fastest possible checkmate in chess, occurring in two moves. It is so named because it requires the losing player to make two consecutive blunders, weakening the king's diagonal catastrophically. 

Scholar's Mate is the four-move checkmate every beginner both attempts and falls for at some point. White attacks f7 with the queen and bishop early, targeting the weakest point in Black's starting position. It fails against any prepared opponent but explains why f7 is called the Achilles' heel of the starting position.

Back Rank Mate is checkmate delivered when a rook or queen slides to the opponent's back rank and the king has no escape square because its own pawns are blocking the exits. This is why experienced players create a luft (a breathing square for their king) by pushing one of the pawns in front of it. Luft comes from the German word for air, which is exactly what a trapped king needs.

Smothered Mate is one of the most satisfying checkmates in chess. A knight delivers a checkmate to a king completely surrounded by its own pieces which have accidentally imprisoned it. 

Piece Concepts You Need

Minor piece refers to bishops and knights, as distinct from the major pieces. The distinction matters when describing trades and material imbalances. Giving up a rook for a minor piece, for example, is called losing the exchange.

Major piece refers to rooks and queens. Losing a major piece for a minor piece is almost always catastrophic unless there is extraordinary positional compensation involved.

Good bishop is a bishop whose own pawns sit on the opposite color, leaving its diagonals open and active. The opposite of a bad bishop. In open positions, a good bishop can dominate the entire board.

Rook on the seventh is a rook placed on the opponent's seventh rank, attacking unmoved pawns and cutting the king off from the action. Two rooks on the seventh rank together are sometimes called pigs because of how aggressively they devour material.

Opposite-colored bishops describe a position in which each player has one bishop, but they move on different-colored squares and therefore can never attack each other. Opposite colored bishops strongly favor draws in endgames because neither side can make progress. But they favor the attacking side in middlegames because the defender cannot use their bishop to cover the squares the attacker's bishop controls.

Clock and Time Terms

Classical chess is the full-length time control used in world championships and serious tournament play. Typically 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 30 more minutes, with a 30-second increment per move added. 

Rapid chess is a time control typically set at 15 to 60 minutes per player. Fast enough to reward intuition, slow enough for genuine content.

Bullet chess is under three minutes per player, often one minute each. Pattern recognition and intuition replace calculation almost entirely.

Correspondence chess is chess played by post or email, with players taking days or weeks per move. It is computer-assisted at the top level today and, as a result, deeply analytical.

Zeitnot is the German word for time pressure. When a player is in zeitnot with seconds remaining to make many moves, the most spectacular blunders and the most heroic saves both tend to happen simultaneously.

Increment is extra time added to a player's clock after each move, preventing games from ending on flag rather than on the board.

Flag is when a player's clock runs to zero. In older mechanical clocks, a small flag on the clock face would fall when time expired, which is how the term originated.

Tournament Structure Terms

Elo rating is the numerical system developed by physicist Arpad Elo that measures chess playing strength, updating after every rated game based on the expected and actual result.

Norm is a performance result strong enough to count toward earning a title. A Grandmaster title requires three GM norms combined with a 2500 Elo rating.

Swiss system is a tournament format where players are paired against opponents with similar scores in each round. The standard format for most open chess tournaments.

Round-robin is a format in which every player plays every other player, producing the clearest ranking. Elite invitationals are typically small round-robins.

Draw offer is a formal proposal to end the game as a draw. Under current FIDE rules, offers should be made directly after your own move. Excessive draw offers are considered unsportsmanlike.

Touch move is the rule that if you touch a piece, you must move it, and if you touch an opponent's piece, you must capture it if possible. Saying j'adoube before touching a piece exempts you from the touch-move rule.

Adjudication is the process of evaluating an unfinished game by an official who assigns a result based on the final position. Used in correspondence chess and some older tournament formats.

Bye is when a player has no opponent for a round, usually in a Swiss tournament with an odd number of players. A bye typically scores as a half point or full point depending on the tournament rules.

Forfeit is losing a game without playing it, usually due to lateness, rule violation, or withdrawal. 

Threefold repetition is when the same position appears on the board three times with the same player to move and the same legal moves available. Either player may claim a draw.

Fifty move rule is the rule allowing either player to claim a draw if fifty consecutive moves have passed without a pawn move or capture.

Arbiter is the tournament official responsible for enforcing the rules and resolving disputes.

Cultural and Historical Chess Terms

Romantic chess describes the swashbuckling style of chess played in the 18th and 19th centuries, characterized by bold sacrifices, direct king attacks, and spectacular combinations without much regard for positional principles. The Immortal Game, played by Adolf Anderssen in 1851, in which he sacrificed both rooks, his bishop, and his queen to deliver a checkmate, is its defining example.

Hypermodern is a chess philosophy developed in the 1920s that challenged the classical principle of occupying the center with pawns. Hypermodernists like Nimzowitsch and Réti argued that controlling the center with pieces from a distance was equally valid and often more flexible. 

Patzer is slang for a weak chess player who makes careless blunders without understanding why their moves are bad. It comes from German slang and is used affectionately within the chess community.

Simul is a simultaneous exhibition where one player faces many opponents at once, walking from board to board. Kasparov once played 32 opponents simultaneously, scoring 28 wins, 2 draws, and 2 losses.

Brilliancy is a game of exceptional creative quality, typically featuring a surprising sacrifice or a deeply imaginative combination. 

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