I am very grateful to Mr. Lee Duigon for teaching me how to play chess! Thanks to Mr. Duigon, I can play chess now! Here is the very first lesson he gave me…
OK–the first thing you have to learn is how to read the board. It’s the same as a checkerboard, but in chess, each square has a name. This is called chess notation.
Set up the board with a white square in the lower right-hand corner. The back row, the row nearest you, is lettered, left to right, “a” through “h”. The a1 square is in your lower left-hand corner, with h1 on the right. These horizontal rows are called “ranks.”
The vertical columns, 1-8, are “files.” Your back row is a1 through h1, if you’re playing White. Black’s back row is a8-h8. You need to learn this simple notation so you can read and replay chess games. That’s Lesson One.
When you’ve mastered the notation, we’ll go on to the next lesson.
(By Lee Duigon, October 21st, 2018, on The Scrabble Game)
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Please follow Lee Duigon at: http://leeduigon.wordpress.com/ And I highly recommend his Bell Mountain Series!