Chess notation is the system for writing a move as a short string of characters: a capital letter for the piece, a two-character square name for where it lands, and a few symbols for captures, check and the special moves. Nf3 means "knight to f3." exd5 means "the e-pawn captures on d5." Qxf7# means "queen takes on f7, checkmate."
The modern standard is algebraic notation, and it is the only system you need. It is what FIDE uses for official scoresheets, what every chess book published in the last forty years uses, and what every website and engine reads and writes. The whole system is built on one grid and six letters, and the rules below cover every symbol you will ever meet.
The Grid: Files and Ranks
Every square has a unique two-character name, like a coordinate on a map.
- Files are the eight vertical columns, labelled a to h, left to right from White's side of the board.
- Ranks are the eight horizontal rows, numbered 1 to 8, counting up from White's side.
Always write the letter first, then the number: e4, c6, h8. White's king starts on e1, Black's on e8. If you are unsure your board is even the right way round, chess board setup covers the "white on the right" rule first.
Because pawns have no letter of their own, a move written as a bare square name is always a pawn move:
The coordinates never flip
This is the single most common source of confusion for new players. When you sit on the Black side, or when your screen rotates the board so your own pieces are at the bottom, the names do not change with you. The a-file is still the a-file. Rank 1 is still the rank White's king started on. Coordinates belong to the board, not to the player looking at it.
Notice the 1...c5 above. When a Black move is written on its own, without White's move in front of it, the move number is followed by three dots. 1.c5 would mean a White pawn on c5; 1...c5 means Black's reply on move one.
Piece Letters
Each piece is a single capital letter:
| Piece | Letter | Why | | --- | --- | --- | | King | K | — | | Queen | Q | — | | Rook | R | — | | Bishop | B | — | | Knight | N | K was taken by the king | | Pawn | (none) | Pawn moves are the most common, so they are kept shortest |
The letter tells you what moved; the square tells you where it went. Where it came from is normally left out entirely, because on a legal board only one piece of that type can usually reach the destination.
Two variants show up occasionally. Figurine algebraic notation replaces the letter with a small picture of the piece (♘f3 instead of Nf3) so the same page works in every language — the German knight is S for Springer, the French one C for cavalier. Long algebraic notation writes both squares: e2-e4, Ng1-f3, Bc4xf7. It is more verbose but never ambiguous, which is why teaching books and arbiter materials favour it.
Captures
An x between the piece letter and the destination square means a capture: Bxf7, Nxe5, Rxd8. The notation never records what was captured — you work that out from the position.
Pawn captures are the one exception to the "no letter for pawns" rule. Because several pawns might be able to take on the same square, a pawn capture names the file the pawn came from:
Some older sources write pawn captures as cd or cxd, naming only the two files and leaving the rank implied. Modern practice always gives the full destination square.
Check, Checkmate and the Result
| Symbol | Meaning | | --- | --- | | + | Check | | # | Checkmate | | 1-0 | White won | | 0-1 | Black won | | 1/2-1/2 or ½-½ | Draw | | * | Game unfinished or result unknown |
Qh5+ is "queen to h5, check." Qxf7# is "queen takes on f7, checkmate," and the game ends there. A few older books use ++ for checkmate and ch for check; a few modern annotators use ++ for double check instead. Context always makes it clear which convention a book is using, but it is worth knowing that ++ is ambiguous across sources.
A stalemate has no symbol of its own. It simply appears as an ordinary move followed by the drawn result 1/2-1/2.
Castling
Castling is not written as a king move. It has its own pair of symbols:
O-O— kingside (short) castling, the king to g1 or g8O-O-O— queenside (long) castling, the king to c1 or c8
The number of Os matches the number of squares the rook travels. Strictly these are capital letter Os, not zeros, but every chess program in existence accepts 0-0 too, and most players type zeros out of habit. If castling gives check, the + goes on the end: O-O-O+. Full rules for when castling is legal are in how to castle.
En Passant
En passant is written as an ordinary pawn capture, using the square the capturing pawn ends on — not the square the captured pawn was standing on. This catches out almost everyone the first time, because the destination square looks empty before the move.
The suffix e.p. is optional and increasingly rare. exd6 is already unambiguous, since no black pawn could have been standing on d6 for a normal capture.
Promotion
When a pawn reaches the far rank it must become a queen, rook, bishop or knight. Write the pawn move, then =, then the letter of the new piece:
e8=Q— pawn to e8, promoting to a queenaxb8=N+— pawn takes on b8, promotes to a knight, and gives checkf1=R— an underpromotion to a rook
Some databases and older books drop the equals sign and write e8Q, and a few use a slash: e8/Q. All three mean the same thing.
Disambiguation: When Two Pieces Can Reach the Same Square
If two identical pieces could legally move to the destination, the move must say which one went. The rule has a fixed order of preference:
- Add the file of the starting square:
Rad1,Nbd2,Rfe1. - If both pieces are on the same file, add the rank instead:
R1d3,N5f3. - If neither alone is enough — possible with three queens after promotions — give the whole starting square:
Qh4e1.
Two details save a lot of confusion. First, only add the extra character when it is genuinely needed; Nf3 is correct and complete when only one knight can get there. Second, "legally" does the real work: if one of the two knights is pinned against its own king and therefore cannot move, there is no ambiguity and no extra letter is required.
Disambiguation combines freely with captures and check. Ngxe5+ is "the knight on the g-file captures on e5 with check."
Annotation Symbols
These are the annotator's opinion of a move, not part of the move itself. Strip them out and the notation still describes the same game.
| Symbol | Meaning | | --- | --- | | ! | A good move | | !! | An excellent or brilliant move | | ? | A mistake | | ?? | A blunder | | !? | An interesting move worth considering, often speculative | | ?! | A dubious move the annotator would not recommend |
!? and ?! are the two people get backwards. The order is a rough scale: the first symbol carries the weight. !? leans positive ("I like this, though it may not be objectively best"), ?! leans negative ("this is probably not sound, but it is not a clear error").
A second family of symbols evaluates the resulting position rather than the move, and appears after a move or at the end of a variation:
| Symbol | Meaning | | --- | --- | | = | Equal position | | +/= or ⩲ | White is slightly better | | =/+ or ⩱ | Black is slightly better | | +/- or ± | White is clearly better | | -/+ or ∓ | Black is clearly better | | +- | White has a winning position | | -+ | Black has a winning position | | ∞ | Unclear |
All of these predate engines and are human judgements. When you run the same position through an engine you get a number instead — and the two often disagree, which is itself worth noticing when you analyze your games.
A Full Worked Example
Here is Scholar's Mate written out completely:
1. e4 e5
2. Bc4 Nc6
3. Qh5 Nf6??
4. Qxf7# 1-0Read it move by move:
- White's e-pawn to e4; Black's e-pawn to e5.
- White's bishop to c4; Black's knight to c6.
- White's queen to h5; Black's knight to f6 — marked
??because it develops a piece while ignoring the threat. - White's queen captures on f7 with checkmate. White wins,
1-0.
If you followed that, you can read notation. Scholar's Mate explained covers why move three is a bad idea for White in the long run, despite the trap.
How to Read a PGN File
PGN stands for Portable Game Notation. It is the standard text format for storing a whole game, and every site, database and engine imports and exports it. A PGN has two parts: a block of headers in square brackets, then the moves.
[Event "Casual Game"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "2026.01.15"]
[Round "-"]
[White "Player One"]
[Black "Player Two"]
[Result "1-0"]
1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nc6 3. Qh5 Nf6?? {Ignores the threat to f7.}
(3... g6 4. Qf3 Nf6 {holds everything.}) 4. Qxf7# 1-0The first seven headers are known as the Seven Tag Roster and always appear in that order:
- Event — the name of the tournament or match;
?if unknown. - Site — where it was played, conventionally "City, Region COUNTRY".
- Date —
YYYY.MM.DD, with??filling any unknown part, as in1972.??.??. - Round — the round number,
-if the concept does not apply,?if unknown. - White and Black — surname first, then given names:
Fischer, Robert James. - Result —
1-0,0-1,1/2-1/2, or*for an unfinished game.
Anything else you see — ECO, WhiteElo, TimeControl, Opening, FEN — is an optional extra tag. A FEN tag matters: it means the game does not start from the normal position, and the moves should be replayed from the position that tag describes.
In the movetext itself:
- Curly braces
{ }hold a comment. - Parentheses
( )hold a variation — an alternative line that was not played. Variations can nest inside each other, which is why deeply annotated PGNs look like a thicket of brackets. $numbers are NAGs, numeric annotation glyphs, an equivalent machine-readable form of the symbols above:$1is!,$2is?,$3is!!,$4is??,$5is!?,$6is?!.- The result token is repeated at the very end of the movetext, which is how a program knows the game has finished.
Line breaks in a PGN mean nothing at all. A game may be one long line or wrapped every eighty characters; both parse identically.
FEN: One Position Instead of a Whole Game
FEN (Forsyth–Edwards Notation) describes a single position in one line. The starting position is:
rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1It has six fields, separated by spaces:
- Placement, rank 8 first down to rank 1, ranks separated by
/. Uppercase is White, lowercase is Black, and a digit counts consecutive empty squares. - Side to move:
worb. - Castling rights still available:
KQkq, or-if none remain. - En passant target square, if a pawn just moved two squares — otherwise
-. - Halfmove clock, moves since the last capture or pawn move, used for the fifty-move rule.
- Fullmove number, which increments after each Black move.
You rarely write FEN by hand, but you will paste one constantly to set up a puzzle or resume a position. Every diagram on this page is stored as a FEN, and the "play this position" link under each one hands that FEN straight to the board.
Descriptive Notation, for Old Books
Chess literature published before roughly 1980 in English mostly uses descriptive notation, and you will meet it if you pick up a second-hand book or read a nineteenth-century game collection. It is worth twenty minutes of recognition, not study.
In descriptive notation, files are named after the piece that started on them — QR, QN, QB, Q, K, KB, KN, KR — and ranks are counted from each player's own side. Squares therefore have two different names depending on who is moving. Pieces are also written with letters, and the move records the piece and its destination joined by a hyphen:
1. P-K4 P-K4
2. N-KB3 N-QB3
3. B-N5 P-QR3That is the Ruy Lopez, which in algebraic reads 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6. Both first moves are written P-K4: White's king pawn goes to White's fourth rank, Black's to Black's fourth rank — e4 and e5 respectively. Captures are written PxP or NxB, naming pieces rather than squares, and are often ambiguous enough to need a suffix. Older books also write the knight as Kt rather than N.
No modern publisher uses descriptive notation. Algebraic has been the FIDE standard for decades and wins on every count: shorter, symmetrical, and never vague about which square is meant.
Do You Have to Record Your Moves?
In casual and online play, no — the software keeps the score for you. In rated over-the-board chess, yes: FIDE's Laws require both players to write down each move, their own and the opponent's, on a scoresheet, using algebraic notation. The scoresheet is the evidence used to settle claims about threefold repetition and the fifty-move rule, so a sloppy one can cost you a draw you were entitled to.
There is one common relief. Under the standard rules, if a player has fewer than five minutes remaining and the time control does not give an increment of at least thirty seconds a move, that player is not obliged to keep score for the rest of that time period. Learning to write moves quickly, without looking down for long, is part of managing the clock rather than a separate skill.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does N mean in chess notation? N is the knight. K was already taken by the king, so the knight uses the next distinctive letter in its name.
What does x mean in chess notation? A capture. Bxf7 means a bishop captured whatever stood on f7. For pawn captures, the pawn's starting file comes first: exd5.
How do you write check in chess notation? Add + after the move: Qh5+. Checkmate uses # instead: Qxf7#.
Why is there no letter for pawns? Pawn moves are the most frequent moves in a game, so leaving the letter off keeps notation short. Any move written as a bare square — e4, d5 — is a pawn move.
What does Rad1 mean? The rook on the a-file moves to d1. The extra letter appears only when the other rook could also legally reach d1.
What is the difference between !? and ?! !? is a move the annotator finds interesting and slightly favours; ?! is one they consider dubious. The first symbol sets the tone.
What does 1... mean in front of a move? Three dots mean the move is Black's. 1.e4 is a White move; 1...e5 is Black's reply on move one, written this way whenever it appears without White's move in front of it.
Is O-O the letter O or the number zero? Officially the letter O. In practice both are typed constantly and every program accepts either.
**What does mean at the end of a PGN?* The game is unfinished, adjourned, or its result is unknown.
Practise It on a Real Board
Notation only becomes automatic through use, and the fastest way to get there is to write moves while you play them. Open the free board at LocalChess, play ten moves against the engine, and write your moves down by hand before checking them against the move list on screen. Then click "play this position" under any diagram on this page and see whether you can name the last move that was made.
Once notation stops being a translation exercise, the whole literature of the game opens up. Try replaying a classic with the moves in front of you — Morphy's Opera Game is short, brilliant and famously easy to follow — or work through famous chess games one move at a time.