The word “Checkmate” in Chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,” which means “the King is dead.” While in the starting position, there are eight different ways to checkmate in […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: Perilous times for pawns!
Did you know that the piece with the lowest survival rate is the white queen’s pawn at d2? That’s right, out of 2.2 million master level games, this pawn survives […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: Keeping the King on the move!
When it comes to king moves, the most interesting is castling, for which I did manage to find a few statistics on the web, based on official games: White castles […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: Quickly created Queens
Ah, the most powerful piece in the game. The queen. She can move in eight directions over great distances, she can outmaneuver any single piece on the board, she is […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: Building Bishops
Did you know that Bobby Fischer’s favorite piece was the king side bishop? Well, at least it is according to Grand Master Mihail Marin in his book, “Learn From the Legends: […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: A Rook-ie mistake!
The rook is believed to have once been the “rukh”, which was some sort of tower shaped carriage that was placed on top of an elephant. Supposedly, the rukh […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: A knight’s tale.
Now that we have a visual board to display, and we’ve called for the engine to check for all available moves, we need to actually add moves for each piece. […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: Getting “board” already?
They say that the folding chessboard was invented by a priest who was forbidden to play chess. This priest found a way to hide his game by making a folding […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: the Just Chess Engine is just getting started…..
There are only 20 first moves in any standard game of chess. 20 choices, 20 options. Statistically, only 10 of those options regularly result in a win, or at worse, […]
Fool’s Mate Friday: The JustChessEngine
Sometimes, you just have to step out in a new direction. In the 1920’s, chess players began to hold to a new style of play, then called hypermodernism. In this […]