"The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it."
- Aaron Nimzowitsch

Before starting the exercises for this lesson, let me talk a bit about chess problems. Chess problems are created for entertaining or for training purposes. The positions are usually taken from games already played but they might also be invented by chess players. Specialized chess magazines and web sites usually propose a section containing chess problems. A chess problem is composed of a position and some extra information needed to solve the problem. For example, the information could be something like "White to mate in 2 moves". To find the solution, the position must be analysed in order to find the moves' sequence that both players need to play. Solving these kind of problems helps in developing better analysis skills and helps also to memorize position patterns that could very well occur in one of your chess game.

If you worked seriously on all the previous pages for this turorial, you know enough at this point to resolve simple chess problems. You will find several of them in the exercises of the upcoming lessons. But before letting you work on your exercises for this lesson, let's see what a chess problem looks like with the example below.

 

Usually, solutions to chess problems are using the algebraic notation to give the answer. We will study this system in lesson 6, but for now we will use another way to check your answers. You will then be able to concentrate on the rules you learned in the current lesson.

That concludes this lesson... let's see if you grasped everything with the exercises available on the next page.

I do not recommend it, but you can also skip the exercises and go directly to the next lesson on the advanced and special chess rules.