The printable chess cheat sheet

A cheat sheet does not make you better at chess. What it does is get a handful of things out of the way — the arithmetic, the notation, the shapes that repeat — so that the thinking you do at the board is spent on the position rather than on remembering what a rook is worth.

Every diagram below was checked against Stockfish before it was published. That is a lower bar than it sounds like, and most printable sheets on the internet do not clear it.

What the pieces are worth

The king has no number. Losing it ends the game, so it cannot be traded — but as a fighting piece in an endgame it is worth roughly four, which is why walking it towards the centre once the queens come off is usually right.

Treat these as accounting, not truth. Three specifics worth carrying:

• Two bishops together are worth more than the sum of the parts, somewhere around half a pawn more, because between them they cover every square on the board.
• Knights prefer blocked positions, bishops prefer open ones. Whether a knight and a bishop are really equal depends entirely on how many pawns are locked.
• A rook is worth more as the board empties. Open files are what it needs, and open files are what an endgame has.

The same convention is what an engine reports in. Our guide on reading the eval bar covers why +1.4 does not mean anybody is a pawn up.

Reading and writing the moves

Files are lettered a to h from White’s left. Ranks are numbered 1 to 8 starting at White’s side. Every square has one name, and both players use the same one.

When two identical pieces could both reach a square, the file goes in between: Nbd2 is the knight coming from the b-file, not the other one. If they share a file, the rank is used instead.

The opening, without memorising a single line

1. Take a share of the centre with a pawn, then develop pieces that support it.
2. Bring out minor pieces before the queen. The queen is the easiest piece to harass, and every tempo spent rescuing her is a tempo your opponent spends developing.
3. Castle within the first ten moves unless you have a concrete reason not to.
4. Do not move the same piece twice in the opening without a reason worth the tempo.
5. Connect the rooks. When your back rank is empty between them, the opening is over.

Every one of these is broken by strong players regularly, and always for a concrete reason they can name. That is the actual rule: the defaults buy you a playable position, and a reason buys you the right to ignore one.

The four mates worth knowing by shape

Not to memorise as positions — to recognise as shapes, so that you notice the pattern forming while there is still time to build it or stop it. In each diagram it is White to move, and mate is one move away.

The endgame worth knowing before any other

King and pawn against king. It looks like nothing, it is the foundation every other pawn endgame is built on, and it is the difference between half a point and a whole one often enough to be the first ending anybody should learn properly.

• White to move: draw. White has to step aside, Black steps in front of the pawn, and the position repeats itself forever. Stockfish scores it 0.00.
• Black to move: White wins. Black must give way, White’s king gets in front of its own pawn, and the pawn queens. Stockfish scores it as winning for White.

The rule underneath it is the opposition: when the two kings face each other with one square between them, the player who has to move is the player who has to give way. In this ending that is the whole game. Everything else — how many pawns, which side, how far advanced — is detail on top of it.

Two more that pay for themselves immediately:

• The square of the pawn. To know whether a lone king catches a runner without counting moves, draw the square that has the pawn and its promotion square as one side. If the king is inside it — or can step inside it on its move — it catches the pawn. If not, it does not. One exception to draw it correctly: a pawn still on its starting square can advance two, so measure the square from the third rank rather than the second.
• Rooks belong behind passed pawns. Yours and theirs. Behind your own it gains scope as the pawn advances; behind theirs it loses scope as the pawn advances.

The blunder check

Four questions, ten seconds, before the move is played rather than after. This is the only item on this page that will change your results this month.

1. What does their last move attack that it did not attack before?
2. What of mine is now undefended, and what of theirs?
3. Their checks, captures and threats, before mine.
4. If I play this move, what is their best reply to it?

The order matters. Most players run the list on their own ideas and never on their opponent’s, which is precisely why the move that beats them is the one they never looked at.

Questions people ask