Kid Chess Academy: How bishops move.

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Here, we're going to learn how the bishops move. We'll be using the animated chessviewer to illustrate the various moves. Use the horizontal scrollbar or click on the moves one by one to see how bishops move. I'll be telling you what's going on in the text window that's just below the board. Play it back and forth as many times as you want to understand how bishops move.

Note: you MAY have to hit the vertical scroll bar on the text window below the board to see all of my comments. This seems to be true with Netscape® browsers. Microsoft® Internet Explorer doesn't seem to have this problem.

Now, I want to go over that bit about bishops always staying on the same color of square as from which they started.

Here we have an admittedly improbable position of a white king and bishop facing 7 black pawns and a king. Every square on which the bishop can potentially land is marked with a red dot (except where the king and bishop currently sit). There are two things to note here.

	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h
8									8
7									7
6									6
5									5
4									4
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h

The only place where you have red dots (signifying squares that can be visited by the bishop) are the dark squares, because this is a dark-squared bishop. Remember there's 64 squares on the board. Half of them are dark, half are light. That means that fully 50 percent of the chessboard (the light squares) will never be affected by the movements of the dark-squared bishop.

Notice that all the black pieces are on light colored squares. As long as they stay on light squares, none of black's pieces has A THING TO FEAR from white's bishop, simply because its on the opposite colored square.

But if you add another bishop....

	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h
8									8
7									7
6									6
5									5
4									4
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h

Ah, if you add another bishop, a light-squared bishop, and let them work together in a team, then there isn't one square inch of the board that's safe from white, as indicated by the red balls. The white-squared bishop exerts influence over his half of the board (the white squares) and the black-squared bishop oversees the black squares. Black has to be careful, now, since no square on the board is safe from the prying eyes of one or the other of white's bishops. Both bishops working together can cover the board. And this shows that a pair of bishops (sometimes called a 'bishop pair') can be worth quite a lot!

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