En passant is a special pawn capture: if your opponent's pawn uses its two-square first move to slide past your pawn, landing directly beside it, you may capture it on your very next move as though it had only moved one square. Your pawn moves diagonally to the square the enemy pawn skipped over, and the enemy pawn is removed from the board — even though your pawn never lands on the square it was standing on.
It is French for "in passing", it is the only capture in chess where the captured piece is not on the square the capturing piece arrives at, and it is the single most common reason a beginner accuses an opponent of cheating. It is not cheating. It is Article 3.7 of the FIDE Laws of Chess, and it has been part of the game for roughly five hundred years.
The three conditions — all three must hold
En passant is legal only when every one of these is true at the same moment. If any single one fails, the capture simply does not exist.
- Your capturing pawn is on its fifth rank. Rank 5 for White, rank 4 for Black. No other rank works.
- The enemy pawn has just advanced two squares from its starting rank, landing directly beside your pawn on an adjacent file — so the two pawns are side by side on the same rank.
- You capture immediately, on your very next move. Not later.
Two more constraints are worth stating plainly, because they trip people up:
- Only a pawn can capture en passant. A rook, bishop, knight, queen or king sitting on d5 gets nothing when a pawn runs past on e7-e5.
- Only a pawn can be captured en passant. There is no version of the rule involving any other piece.
En passant is also optional. You are never obliged to take — unless it happens to be your only legal move, in which case you must play it like any other forced move.
Watch it happen: before and after
Here is the position people cannot picture from text. White has pushed a pawn to d5. Black answers with ...e7-e5, sliding the pawn two squares so that it sits shoulder to shoulder with White's pawn, apparently having slipped past the diagonal.
The black pawn looks safe. It is not. White plays 3.dxe6 — the d5 pawn moves diagonally onto e6, the square the black pawn jumped over, and the black pawn on e5 is lifted off the board.
Compare the two boards square by square and the whole rule falls into place. The capturing pawn behaves exactly as it would have if the black pawn had played the modest ...e7-e6 instead: it takes diagonally, onto e6. The only unusual part is that its victim was standing one square further on.
The full sequence in notation:
1. d4 Nf6
2. d5 e5
3. dxe6The same thing from Black's side
The mirror case is identical with the colours swapped, except that the capturing black pawn must be on rank 4 and the white pawn advances e2-e4.
Black replies 3...dxe3, landing on e3 and removing the pawn from e4.
1. Nf3 d5
2. b3 d4
3. e4 dxe3Use it or lose it: the right expires after one move
This is the condition most often forgotten, and it is absolute: the capture must be made on the move immediately after the two-square advance.
Go back to the first example. Suppose that instead of taking, White develops with 3.Nf3 and Black replies 3...Bd6. The black pawn is still on e5. The white pawn is still on d5. They are still side by side. And dxe6 is now illegal, permanently.
There is no way to reclaim it. Each two-square pawn advance creates exactly one opportunity, for exactly one move, and then it is gone for the rest of the game.
This is not a quirk of software. It is why a chess position cannot be fully described by piece placement alone, and why the FEN notation used by engines and databases carries an en passant target square as its fourth field. In the first diagram above that field reads e6; in the diagram immediately above it reads -. Same pieces, same squares, genuinely different positions.
It matters for the rules too. Under the threefold repetition rule, two positions only count as the same if the available moves are the same — including en passant rights. A position where a capture on e6 is available is not the same position as one where it is not, even if every piece is on an identical square.
When en passant is not available
Three near-miss situations account for almost every mistaken en passant claim.
The enemy pawn arrived one square at a time
This is the big one, and it is visually indistinguishable from the legal case. Here Black has played ...e7-e6 and then, a move later, ...e6-e5. The pawns end up side by side exactly as before.
The two-square jump is the entire justification for the rule. A pawn that advances one square at a time is never vulnerable to en passant, because it never skipped anything.
Your pawn is on the wrong rank
A white pawn on d4 that watches ...e7-e5 go by has no en passant claim, because it was never in position to control e6 in the first place. It may of course capture normally with dxe5 if that pawn ends up on a square it attacks — but that is an ordinary capture, not en passant. The fifth-rank requirement is not decoration: it is precisely the rank from which your pawn controls the square the enemy pawn is skipping.
Taking would leave your own king in check
Like every move in chess, an en passant capture is illegal if it exposes your own king. En passant is unusually good at this, because it removes two pieces from the same rank at once: your pawn leaves the rank, and the captured pawn leaves the rank.
Play fxg6 here in your head: the f5 pawn goes to g6, the g5 pawn comes off, and suddenly the rook on a5 stares straight down the rank at the king on h5. The move is illegal, so White must settle for something else. Positions like this are a favourite of composers, and they are the reason engines evaluate en passant as a full legality check rather than a shortcut. If you want the mechanics, this is the same self-pin logic that makes any pinned piece unable to move.
How to write it down
En passant is recorded exactly like any other pawn capture: the file the capturing pawn came from, an x, and the square it lands on.
dxe6
exd3
fxg6Older books sometimes append e.p. — dxe6 e.p. — but the annotation is optional and has largely fallen out of use. It was never needed: no other legal pawn move could produce that result, so the notation is already unambiguous. If you are still finding algebraic notation slippery, the guide to reading chess notation covers the whole system.
One consequence worth noting: because the capturing pawn always lands on the sixth rank (White) or third rank (Black), an en passant capture can never be a promotion. If you are hunting for the edge cases of pawn moves, promotion and underpromotion is where the genuinely strange stuff lives.
Why the rule exists at all
En passant is not an arbitrary exception bolted onto the game. It is a patch that repairs damage done by an earlier rule change.
For most of chess's history — in the game's older forms and in medieval European play — a pawn could only ever move one square forward, including on its first move. Openings crawled. It took a great many moves before the two armies were within reach of each other, and the early phase of the game was close to a formality.
Around the late fifteenth century, European players reworked several rules to speed the game up. The queen gained her modern long-range move, the bishop gained his, and pawns were given the option of a two-square advance on their first move only. These changes together produced roughly the game we play today, and the history of chess is largely the story of that transformation.
But the two-square move created a loophole. Under the old rules, a pawn on e7 marching to e6 could be captured by an enemy pawn on d5. Under the new rules, that same pawn could hop from e7 straight to e5, sailing past the guarded square and arriving safely on the other side of a defender that would previously have stopped it. A rule introduced to save time had quietly become a way to evade a pawn that was already in position to capture.
En passant closes that loophole precisely. It grants the two-square move its tempo while denying it the ability to dodge. The defending pawn gets exactly the capture it would have had under the old rules — no more, no less. That is why the capture is restricted to the immediately following move: it is a substitute for a capture that would have been available at that exact moment, not a standing privilege.
Adoption was not instantaneous or universal. Italian practice in particular held out against the rule for centuries, so games played under Italian conventions allowed a pawn to run past a defender untouched; the international rules only became fully uniform in the nineteenth century. Every modern rule set, from FIDE to every online platform, includes en passant.
Seen this way, en passant is the most conservative rule in chess. It exists to stop a newer rule from changing something older.
Does en passant matter in real games?
More than its reputation as trivia suggests, though the situations are specific.
It breaks blockades. A pawn that has advanced to the fifth rank is often stuck, staring at a defended square. When an enemy pawn tries to slip past on an adjacent file to build a wall, en passant lets you crack that wall open before it sets. This comes up constantly in closed structures where one side is trying to seal the position — see pawn chains for why sealing matters so much.
It changes the pawn structure, not just the material count. Taking en passant moves your pawn diagonally onto a new file. That can hand you a half-open file for a rook, create a passed pawn, or leave you with doubled pawns you did not want. Material stays level — one pawn each way — so the decision is almost always structural. Whether to take is a question about the resulting pawn structure, and the answer is genuinely "it depends".
It can give check or even checkmate. The capturing pawn may land on a square from which it attacks the enemy king. More interestingly, removing the captured pawn can open a line for a piece behind it, producing a discovered check that has nothing to do with the pawn that moved.
It can be the move that saves you in zugzwang. When every other legal move ruins your position, an available en passant capture is an extra option in your list — and occasionally the only one that does not lose. This is the flip side of zugzwang: options are worth something purely for existing.
It is never a mistake to know. Missing an available en passant capture in a real game is rare, but being surprised by one costs players time on the clock and confidence in the position. Both are worth avoiding.
Frequently asked questions
Is en passant a real rule? Yes. It is in the official FIDE Laws of Chess under Article 3.7, which governs pawn movement, and it has been standard for roughly five centuries. It is not a house rule, a website bug, or something an opponent invented.
Can any piece capture en passant? No. Only a pawn can capture en passant, and only a pawn can be captured by it. No other piece is involved on either side.
Can I capture en passant a move or two later? No. The capture must be made on the move immediately following the enemy pawn's two-square advance. Play anything else and the right is gone permanently for that pawn.
Is en passant compulsory? No, it is optional — with the single exception that if it is your only legal move, you must play it, exactly as with any other forced move.
Does en passant work if the pawn only moved one square? No. The two-square jump is the whole basis of the rule. A pawn that steps forward one square at a time is never vulnerable.
Can I capture en passant if my pawn is on the fourth rank as White? No. White's capturing pawn must be on rank 5 and Black's on rank 4. Those are the only ranks from which a pawn controls the square an enemy pawn skips over.
Why was my pawn taken by something that did not land on it? That is en passant, and it is the only situation in chess where it happens. The capturing pawn moves to the square your pawn passed over, and your pawn is removed from the square just behind it.
Can en passant deliver checkmate? Yes. The capturing pawn can give check directly, or removing the captured pawn can uncover a discovered check from a piece behind it. Either can be mate if the king has no answer.
Can an en passant capture be illegal? Yes — for the same reason any move can be. If making the capture would leave your own king in check, the move is not legal. Because en passant clears two squares on the same rank at once, this comes up more often than you would expect.
Try it on the board
Reading about en passant only gets you so far; the rule clicks the first time you play it yourself and watch the pawn disappear from a square your pawn never touched.
Every diagram above has a Play this position link that drops you straight onto the free board here on LocalChess — no account, no signup, and the engine enforces the rule properly, including the one-move expiry and the self-check case. The fastest way to internalise it: open the first diagram, play dxe6, then open it again and play a quiet move instead so you can see the option vanish.
When you have it, the other rules that ambush beginners late are castling, stalemate, and pawn promotion. If you are earlier than that, start with setting up the board and the opening basics.