Talk:Rules of chess

Ordered lists
I notice that while the ordered lists display fine in Opera 5.12, in Internet Explorer 5.50 the numbers are simply omitted. It must have something to do with the left-aligned tables. Does anyone have any insight into this problem? --Fritzlein

Time - needs improvment to article
Visited this page to try to get an idea of different typical time controls clubs and tournaments use. Yes I know it varies, but an indication would be informative.

Types of dead position
The article states, "There are two kinds of dead position:". This statement would generally be understood to mean that every dead position can be categorized into exactly one of the mentioned types. However, the two mentioned types are "has a piece combination that the USCF specifically mentions as constituting insufficient material" and "has a piece combination that could be used to form a non-dead position", and those types overlap at "has king and some-color-squared bishop against king and same-color-squared bishop". In my opinion, it'd make a lot more sense for the two types to be "has a piece combination that could be used to form a non-dead position" and "has a piece combination that could not be used to form a non-dead position". ISaveNewspapers (talk) 22:18, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
 * The double negative in your suggested rewrite defeats easy comprehension, IMO. --IHTS (talk) 22:37, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Seconded, pedantry does not improve articles. FIDE rules do not refer to "insufficient material" or otherwise distinguish between types of dead positions. The only reason to list the piece combinations and distinguish it from blocked positions is explanatory, so we definitely don't need to complicate the wording. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 01:28, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
 * The classification is not even complete. It is possible to have positions that are dead because of a forced stalemate or forced insufficient material, but that currently have legal forward play or sufficient material. Double sharp (talk) 14:21, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't mean that's literally the exact way I want it to be worded; I was just conveying the idea. How about this: "positions where no arrangement of material would allow for mate" and "positions where material could be arranged to allow for mate, but no such arrangement can be reached." ISaveNewspapers (talk) 20:23, 15 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I know what you mean by the second, but it just seems very confusing. If we must make a division, I suggest we follow Andrew Buchanan's classification (composer of many problems hinging on the dead-position rule): positions whose "cause of death" has to do with (1) insufficient material, (2) stalemate, or (3) blockage. For the second, consider the diagram; Black is forced to give stalemate, so the position is dead. But it's not actually a stalemate on the board. Of course, in 1880 there wasn't yet a dead position rule, so 44...Kxg8 was played. Although I suppose stalemates are vacuously dead positions, where no sequence of legal moves can lead to checkmate because there aren't any legal moves at all (so such a sequence could only be of length zero) and the position on the board is not a checkmate (ruling out the length-zero sequence of moves). Technically this is still not everything possible: in theory one could have a position that is dead because either insufficient material or stalemate must result, but one can choose which. But at least that covers all the major reasons. Double sharp (talk) 20:29, 15 May 2023 (UTC)


 * The edit I initially made was just to remove the "king and bishop against king and bishop with bishops on the same color" bullet point; I imagine that the resulting version of the section would be easy to understand to most people. Of course, when my edit was reverted, the reason provided in the reversion's edit summary had nothing to do with that; per the edit summary, my edit was reverted due to an inconsistency with the USCF rules. The problem here is that this article and the USCF rules seem to be referring to different things in the first place. Indeed, the USCF rules classify every dead position as a position with "insufficient material"; the listed position types ("king against king", "king against king and minor piece", and "king and bishop against king and bishop with bishops on the same square color") seem only to serve as examples of such. ISaveNewspapers (talk) 20:53, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
 * The FIDE rules define "dead position" (5.2.2). The USCF rules do not.  If we are going to define that term, it should be a quotation or a direct paraphrase of the FIDE definition.  We should not be blazing new trails in defining terms.
 * On the other hand, the USCF rules define "insufficient material to continue", and "insufficient material to win on time", while the FIDE rules do not. In 14D, the rules give four cases of insufficient material to continue, but the fourth case is a catch-all, which includes the first three among others.
 * Generally speaking, we should be hewing closely to both the FIDE and the USCF rules, and of course, mentioning where they differ. That's not easy to do here, but we should try. Bruce leverett (talk) 21:31, 15 May 2023 (UTC)


 * I appreciate this question a lot, as it helped me to realize how my mentioned wording overcomplicates things; thanks! It is also original research in the sense that chess literature does not make this distinction. So removed. Dlbbld (talk) 22:18, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

High-level synopsis instead of detail-level synopsis
Scattered content across Wikipedia's chess articles, like here on chess history (without referencing History_of_chess), lacks cohesion due to insufficient cross-referencing. The article has different levels of detail level information, making it difficult for the reader. Dlbbld (talk) 10:29, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 12 March 2024
Please change the positions of the queens on the board diagram so that the queens are on their own color under the INITIAL SETUP section. Reason: shortly after that diagram the text says to have the queen on her own color and instructs to look at the above diagram but the queens are on the opposite color thus creating confusion and contradiction. Thank you so much for helping this newbie chess player et. al. 174.58.160.178 (talk) 18:10, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Pictogram voting wait.svg Already done The queens are placed correctly, although at first glance I thought it was wrong too. Please see the table matching the symbols to piece names - the queen is the one with multiple spikes on the crown. Jamedeus (talk) 18:24, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Castling discussion
The Moving the pieces section is about nuances of the touch-move rule, which itself is not applicable in the obvious way to chess played online. Since I have only had glancing contact with online chess, I don't know if there is some issue in it that is comparable in importance to touch-move; if there is, I would be interested to know, perhaps it is relevant to this article. I gather that a player castles on some servers by moving the king, and the server moves the rook, and it may be of interest to discuss that somewhere in this article, but it is not directly relevant to this section. Bruce leverett (talk) 02:34, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
 * That's why I didn't mention it. What we need to highlight is that castling is the one case where we need to distinguish between being considered a single move in the sense of a turn or ply, but two in terms of hand movements. The existing wording is misleading because it could imply that castling takes two turns.--Jasper Deng (talk) 03:06, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I see I have been slightly confused; we are not in the Moving the pieces section, we are way earlier. I think the real problem here is that the sentence "It is not allowed to move both king and rook in the same time ..." does not belong in this section, because we haven't even talked about touch-move, let alone about moving the pieces.  I think it would be OK to just remove that sentence; I'll do it tomorrow if there are no objections. Bruce leverett (talk) 03:26, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
 * We're talking about the distinction between the underlying mathematical rules of the game (how the pieces move etc) and the practical rules of the game (touch-move, time controls etc). Stuff related to the touch-move rule and how it applies to castling doesn't belong in the "movement" section. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 08:09, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I concur, except that I agree with Bruce that we do not need the sentence they're referring to either, to be clear.--Jasper Deng (talk) 15:03, 14 March 2024 (UTC)