[nabakin]

tl;dr

K = King

Q = Queen

B = Bishop

R = Rook

N = Knight

Pawns have no letter

.

You append a "+" to the end when it is a check move

You append a "#" to the end when it's a checkmate move

You add an "x" when your move eats another piece

.

Examples

- Moving a rook to g6: Rg6

- Moving a queen to d7 which eats a piece: Qxd7

- Moving a bishop to a3 which checks the opponents king: Ba3+

- Moving a pawn to e5: e5

- Moving a queen to h7 which eats a piece and checks the king: Qxh7+

- Moving a pawn to f4 which checkmates the king: f4#

[kuboble]

There are few more.

Rae1 - rook a to e1. if two rooks on the first line can move to e1. R4d4 - if two rooks on the 4th line can go to d4. Ngxh2# - the knight from g captures on h2 with checkmate.

Nd2e4 - In a rare case that there are 3 knights that can go to a single square

Pawn captures are denoted as exd5 (pawn on the line e captures a pawn on d5) even if there is only one pawn that can make a capture.

[rkagerer]

I learned more from your concise post than I ever have from articles, Wikipedia, etc.

[9dev]

For Real. I finally understood chess notation.

[have_faith]

Just adding promotion

- d8N# pawn moves and promotes to a knight resulting in checkmate (it can happen)

[Tistron]

Thanks for this. What if two rooks can both get to e5, how do you disambiguate?

[bonzini]

Using the column they are on, or the row if they are both on the same column. For example Rac8 moves a rook from a8 to c8, R1d2 moves it from d1 to d2.