alt="remember" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#i000028440000.jpg"/> The rook has the freedom to move any number of squares, but only in straight lines up and down or side to side, as indicated by the rook on d5 in Figure 2-2a. Again, think of the chariot. After a chariot gets ahead of steam, turning corners isn’t easy. Have you ever seen Ben-Hur? The rook moves just like the chariot in that movie, but without the spikes.
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FIGURE 2-2: A rook can move any number of squares unless a fellow soldier is blocking it.
In Figure 2-2b, you can see that the rook can’t move to a square occupied by one of its own pieces, in this case another rook on f5 – nor can it jump over the piece and move to any of the other squares along that rank.
In Figure 2-3a, a white rook and a black rook are ready for battle. The white rook can’t move beyond the black rook along that rank, but it can capture it by removing the black piece and taking its place, as in Figure 2-3b. (In chess notation, this move is written 1. Rxf5 – see Chapter 6 for details on notation.) This concept is the same for the other chessmen (and woman) with the exception of the king, which is immune to capture. But don’t think that you have to capture when given the opportunity. This isn’t checkers!
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FIGURE 2-3: The white rook attacks and captures the black rook.
WEIGHING IN ON CHESS HEAVIES
The rook and the queen are sometimes referred to as heavy or major pieces, because the rook and the queen, assisted by their own king, can checkmate an enemy king by themselves (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of checkmate). Minor pieces – a knight or a bishop – can’t checkmate an enemy king with only their own king for assistance.
Showing Off Slender Curves: The Bishop
The bishop has a slender waist so it can slide between squares along diagonals. (Actually, I don’t really know why the bishop was designed like that, but that’s always how I’ve thought of it.) The bishop is called a minor piece because you can’t deliver checkmate with just a bishop and its king. Go ahead, set up a board and try it (you may want to check out Chapter 4 first). If you can do it, you’ll become world-famous, and I’ll include you in the next edition of this book.
Figure 2-4 shows the bishops and where they start on the chessboard.
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FIGURE 2-4: The bishops take their marks.
Figure 2-5a indicates some possible bishop moves. Unlike the rook (which I describe in the previous section), the attacking power of the bishop depends on where the piece is located on the chessboard and ultimately its mobility or scope, which is simply the number of squares it can move to. The bishop attacks more squares in the center, so it’s more powerful when positioned there. Unfortunately, it’s also more easily attacked there. You can see in Figure 2-5a that the bishop attacks 13 squares. How many squares does it attack in Figure 2-5b? (The correct answer is 9 – don’t count the square that it occupies.)
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FIGURE 2-5: The bishop attacks 13 squares and 9 squares, respectively.
You can tell by looking at the board that some diagonals are longer than others. The diagonals that cross the board’s center are longer than the ones that bisect the corners. Because the bishop doesn’t like hand-to-hand combat, players often position the bishop out of the way along a long diagonal, as in Figure 2-5b.
This quality is so unusual that a special category in chess endings, called the opposite-color bishop ending, exists. This ending arises when each side remains with one bishop, but the bishops are on different-colored squares and are thereby sentenced to roam their own mutually exclusive halves of the board. Figure 2-6 illustrates this type of ending. These bishops are close to one another – they can get close enough to blow each other kisses – but never close enough to capture one another. (Flip to Chapter 15 for full details on chess endings.)
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FIGURE 2-6: The thoroughly unsatisfying opposite-color bishop ending.
The bishop, like the rook, can be blocked by its own army. In fact, the least desirable placement of the bishop is behind pawns of its own color: Pawns (which I discuss later in this chapter) are the least mobile of the chessmen and can render the bishop nearly powerless, as shown in Figure 2-7a. A bishop blocked behind its own pawns is often called a “bad bishop.” Enemy pawns can also restrict the bishop’s mobility, as in Figure 2-7b.
