How does en passant work

Bb5 and later recover back his pawn with Nfxd4. The middle game is the most exciting stage of the chess game filled with tactical combinations and strategies. En passant can occur during the middlegame, and perhaps presents itself the most frequent in this stage of the game. Capturing by En passant can be a clever way to open lines for an attack against the enemy position or enemy King. One such example presents itself in the well known Greek gift A fearsome and deadly attack. This is a brutal attack against the enemy King, where one opposition sacrifices his Bishop in exchange for a relentless onslaught against enemy King.

This series of attack often leads to checkmate. Here is an example of the classic Bishop sacrifice, a gift from White to Black. For the sake of staying on topic, we would only be looking at the line 2…Kg8. This is the line where en passant presents itself which we will soon see. Kxf6 7. Qxh5 and White wins! This goes to show us how important it was for the attacking player to have prior knowledge of this special move. Now that you know how important en passant is in the opening and middle game.

This is a king-pawn end game and it appears that white is in some major trouble. With nothing left on the table, white played the move 1. If Black should reply with 1…a5 with the attempt to win the pawn race, he would find himself on the losing end. The white pawn will simply promote first and the Queen on h8 will control the queening square at a1.

This would be unfortunate for Black. The black g-pawn would feel cheated then because the h-pawn was allowed to sneak by him! However, justice is served thou when he takes en passant with 1…gxh3e. This may have been the reason why en passant was made years ago. By now you should know what is an en passant in chess and how to make this special move during your games. En passant is an extremely important move in chess which should not be taken lightly.

In Europe, some people made changes that sped up the game, and one of these changes was allowing a pawn to move two spaces on its first move. This introduced the possibility of a pawn escaping capture by moving past the space another pawn could capture it on.

To close off this possibility, en passant capture was introduced as an exception to the usual manner of capture by displacement. Another change made to speed up the game was to introduce castling, and one of the conditions on castling was that a king may not castle through check. In both cases, a piece that normally moves one space at a time is given the privilege of making an initial move that spans two spaces. In these cases, some kind of en passant capture is allowed in order to lessen the advantage that a pawn gets from making a double move and that a king gets from castling.

So, en passant capture is allowed in Chess only when a short-range piece exercises a one-time special power. From the perspective of gameplay, allowing en passant capture on a wider scale could overcomplicate the game and make it more difficult to play. It works better as an exception to the general rule than it does as the general rule itself.

The en passant capture can only happen directly after the double step move; the pawn that takes must be on the rank where the taken pawn has moved to during the double step move, as in the examples above.

Although a pawn gets only one chance to capture a particular pawn by en passant , passing up this opportunity does not prevent it from capturing another pawn by en passant if another pawn should make a double move to the space on its other side.

Given how the pawns move, any given pawn will have a maximum of two opportunities to capture a pawn by en passant , though it is limited to taking only one of them. Once a pawn captures by en passant, its move will take it past the rank where it would be possible for it to capture by en passant. Originally written by Hans Bodlaender. Revised and expanded by Fergus Duniho. WWW page created: October 11, You can help out by making a small donation or by using this site's affiliate links when you shop at ebay.

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So, if the default formatting is suitable from a mobile device, it will look right even if that browsers is not up-todate. The diagram below shows what the move 3. The en passant move is closely related to another rule that was created centuries ago to make chess more interesting. In the olden times, pawns could move just one square at a time. To make games faster, people modified pawn moves: they could now jump two squares when leaving their home squares.

When the pawn moves changed, however, the dynamics of the game also changed. A passed pawn is an excellent advantage for the player who has it. But since a pawn could now move two squares on its first move, it was easier to create a passed pawn.

A passed pawn is a criminal which should be kept under lock and key. Mild measures, such as police surveillance, are not sufficient. The en passant rule was then created to prevent such a radical change in the dynamics of the game. This rule prevented players from being able to create passed pawns by merely jumping to the side of an enemy pawn, making chess more exciting to play. En passant is a typical move observed in many grandmaster games.

Here you can find a few cases where famous chess players used that move. Lastly, this exquisite and rare example of an en passant move results in checkmate by Gunnar Gundersen.

Now it's time for you to practice your en passant knowledge. Look at the diagrams below, and either make the capture en passant if the move is allowed, or keep pushing your pawn if it is not. Test 1: Black just moved their pawn from d6 to d5. Capture the black pawn en passant if the move is allowed, or move your pawn to e6 if it is not. Test 2: Black moved their pawn from e7 to e5.