BraRoe Chess Blog

You might look at a chess board and think that there aren’t all that many moves you can make on such a small board.  You have sixteen pieces to work with and sixty-four squares to move them around on.  So, it looks like a lot of moves are possible, but not a ton.

 

Games can end up being extremely short.  A player can forfeit before a move has even been made.  A game of zero moves.  The next shortest possible game would be a two move blunder resulting in what is called a Fool’s Mate.  There are only eight variations that can result in this checkmate and it almost never occurs, even during practice.

 

Games can the opposite direction, too.  The longest recorded game resulted in a draw after two hundred and sixty-nine moves of battle on the chess board.  That’s quite a different scenario than the Fools mate or a forfeit.  A came can go either way depending on your strategy and skill level as opposed to your opponent’s.

 

So now its easy to think of chess as a game that can last a scant two moves or a game that can last a couple of hundred moves lasting hours and hours.  So, you might be extra surprised to find out that the number of legal moves in a game of chess is somewhere around ten to the forty-third power.  Wrap your mind around that figure.

 

With that number in mind, there’s no reason to lock yourself into the same strategy over and over when your playing chess because there are many, many variations to try and no reason not to do a little experimenting to see what works for you the next time you sit down to that chess board.

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Tags: Chess Boards, Chess Opinion //