Entries by King Reza

Author: King Reza

Another example:

I’m playing White.



Messy game! Just look at my King, exposed and unprotected. Luckily my opponent doesn’t have enough material to take him.

He takes the Knight on e7 with his Rook. I sense the mate and I have enough extra pieces. So I don’t bother taking the Rook. I go straight or a mate:

Author: King Reza

I could have mated him in another way too: First drop the Knight on f2 forcing him to take it by his Rook, and then drop a Queen on g1. But the first one looked more beautiful!



Here’s another example, this time more complicated:

Author: King Reza

And now, we come to endings. Basically, an ending is a mate or a draw. I personally like it to be a mate, and a mate of my opponent’s King!

I’ll show you through some examples how mates work in Loop Chess. I’ll start from an easy mate and will continue to more complex mates.

This is the position in move number 17 of a game of mine:



As you have probably guessed, I’m playing as Black. The White King is at the corner and is blocked by Pawns and the Rook. I have many pieces to drop and I’m sure there’s a mate. For you, well, you can assume that there’s one.

Author: King Reza

Loop Chess games can become really hard to play, or absolutely easy to play. Look at the following example:



I’m playing as White! As you can easily see almost the whole board is white and I have an army of waiting-to-be-dropped-onto-the-board pieces. It shouldn’t surprise you that Black resigned the game at this point.

As you see the board is quite simple to understand. But there are positions that players may get ‘scared’ looking at:

Author: King Reza

Black has some options:

• Moving the Queen to either e7 or c8 and putting her out of a possible pin.
• Moving the Rook. This is totally out of the question because the only square black can move the Rook to, is g8. After he does that, I’ll simply take the Pawn on f7 with my Bishop and fork the King and the Rook together and win a Rook.
• Blocking my Knight or Bishop from having access to f7. As you all know, Knights cannot be blocked since they can jump. So Black should really try blocking my Bishop by moving the Pawn on d6 to d5.

I think the last option is the best one. After moving the Pawn to d5, I’ll capture it with my Pawn on e4. Black cannot take my Pawn immediately by the Knight on f6 because I’ll take that too with my Bishop on c4. Instead, he can move his Bishop to g4 and threaten my Queen. This opens the way for the Black Queen to have access to square d5 too. Now, Black can take my Pawn on d5 and then my Bishop if I take the Knight as well.

Author: King Reza

Loop Chess is a very challenging variation of Chess in which captured pieces can be returned to the Board and used as the player’s own piece. This brings to the game excellent and artistic strategies. The ability to put back the pieces onto the board makes the games always exciting and ‘uncertain.’ A lost game in Regular Chess can sometimes be turned into a win for the losing side in Loop Chess. Players can never be sure what happens next. There are many possibilities to consider and both players must always keep their eyes and full attention to the board. If you know how to play, it’s quite easy to win. But if you don’t, well you’ll have to learn!

In Loop Chess, unlike Regular Chess, material advantage is not very important. You can even forget about a lost Queen and continue playing in hopes of a mistake in time from your opponent’s side so that you can take your Queen back by putting a pawn onto the board on the right place. Of course it doesn’t mean you can give up half your pieces and have hope for winning, but even in a very bad situation, you might still get lucky and even win.

There are two types of playing Loop Chess:

• Playing the game aggressively, capturing what you can and then putting them back onto the board the next move and changing the position to your favor fast.
• Playing defensively, first making sure your own King is safe from possible attacks and then slowly trying to improve your attack position.

I personally prefer the first tactic. I usually play aggressively trying to shock my opponent with all the extra pieces that are dropped to the board.

Author: King Reza

OK. As you see I am in check. Generally, there are a few ways to cancel a check:

• You can move your King to a safe square if any exists.
• You can capture the checking piece if possible.
• You can move a piece of yours in between your King and the checking piece so that it ‘blocks’ the check.

According to the position of the board, your choices may vary. It’s always a good idea to pay attention to the side effects of a move you’re making to cancel a check. Sometimes, choosing the wrong method of canceling a check leads you to worse problems. So choose carefully what you want to do. Here I chose to move my King to a safe square:



As you can see, right now I have a good material advantage and my position is very strong too. I have two Pawns that can easily move with the help of my three Knights and promote to precious Queens. So as you see, it was a very good idea promoting that Pawn to a Knight. The more Knights you have, the faster your pieces can move and the more possibilities of movement they have and thus the harder the game for your opponent to manage!

Author: King Reza

The board a couple of moves later:



It’s the 12th move and it’s my turn. It doesn’t seem so, but my Queen is under attack by the White Bishop on d3. I moved it to a5. D6 could have been an option, but White could respond by moving his Bishop on d3 to c5 threatening my Queen again.

It’s a basic rule. Don’t waste your moves. If I had made Qd6, then White would start advancing his position and what I could do was just flee.

Author: King Reza

I think explaining the techniques while talking about a game is more understandable than just saying do this, do that! So I’ll be pasting different parts of the game and then I’ll talk about each part.



White played 4.Be2 which seems to be a good move giving him the opportunity to castle and also giving him a Bishop + Knight on e2. However, my opponent never castled in this game!

I played 4.Qd6. Another good move would have been 4.Bd7. But I like it when I have my Queen on the board. It’s very powerful especially when accompanied by a Knight.

So as you see, I’m trying to get my pieces into the board so that I can benefit from their abilities.

Author: King Reza

Since BrainKing.com is asking players to write articles, I thought it would be a good idea to write about Knight Relay Chess which is a very interesting variation of Chess and brings extra thinking and fun to the games. I am pretty good at playing that game and will try to share some, of course not all, of my knowledge with you who are interested in learning how to play the game and improving your skills at it.

I’ll start with the rules. Basically, Knight Relay Chess has the same rules of regular Chess, meaning that pieces move like they do in Chess, etc But when a piece is located in a square covered by a friendly Knight, meaning that Knight could move to that square if the piece weren’t there, it gets the moving abilities of a Knight as a bonus. So if that piece is a pawn, now it is a pawn plus a Knight at the same time.

So, assuming that a player has made 1.E4, if the player moves his/her Knight to C3 the next move, he/she will be having a Pawn + Knight on E4. This is true even if the player first makes 1.KC3 and then moves the pawn to E4.

There’s more to the Knights than just that. They cannot be captured. So neither can you take your opponent’s Knights nor can they take yours. Not only can’t your Knights be captured, but also they cannot capture any pieces either. The Knights don’t put the Kings in check . So you can safely say that the only thing they do, up to this step, is that they give extra moving abilities to the pieces.

It’s worth mentioning that this extra moving ability is NOT permanent. So if you move the Knight to a square that no longer covers your piece’s location, the piece loses its extra moving abilities and becomes what it originally was. This is true if you move the piece to a square not covered by a Knight too.

Now, let’s start with different strategies.