Rook moves: how does a rook move in chess?

A rook moves in straight lines, any distance, along a row or up and down a column. No diagonals, and no jumping: it stops at the first piece in its path. Tap the white rook on d4 below and fourteen squares light up. Every other piece is on chess pieces names and moves.

How does a rook move in chess?

Four directions, up, down, left and right, as far as you want in one of them per move. The row it stands on is called a rank and the column is called a file, and a rook controls both, all the way to the edge of the board in each direction.

On an empty board the count is the same from everywhere. Seven squares along the rank plus seven up the file is fourteen, whether the rook is on d4 or in a corner. No other piece does that. The rook is the only one whose reach does not care where it stands.

What changes is how much of that reach is useful. A rook captures by landing on an enemy piece at the end of a line, and stops in front of any piece of its own. At the start of a game both rooks sit in corners behind a full row of pawns, so most of those fourteen squares are blocked or go nowhere.

What is a rook worth?

Five points, which puts it above a bishop or a knight at three and below a queen at nine. Winning a rook for a bishop or a knight is called winning the exchange, and it is worth about two pawns.

The number comes from raw coverage. Fourteen squares from anywhere beats what a bishop manages from its very best square, and a rook delivers most simple checkmates because it cuts a king off along a whole rank or file at once.

Castling brings a rook into the game

Castling is the one move where the rook and the king move together on the same turn. The king slides two squares towards a rook and the rook jumps over him to the square he crossed. It takes a rook out of the corner where it was doing nothing and puts it beside the middle of the board, which is often worth as much as the safety it buys the king. The conditions are on castling in chess, with a board for each of them.

Rooks want open files

A file with no pawns on it at all is an open file, and a rook belongs on one. A file with only enemy pawns on it is half-open, which is nearly as good, because the rook has something to attack down it. A file blocked by your own pawn is dead for that rook until the pawn moves or trades itself off.

So the standard plan is short: castle, see which file has opened, and put a rook on it. Then put the other rook behind the first one on the same file, which is called doubling. Two rooks stacked up on an open file are far more than twice as strong as one, because the piece in front can be given away and the one behind takes back.

The seventh rank

The other row a rook wants is the seventh rank, where the enemy pawns started. A rook there attacks every pawn that has not moved and often traps the king on the back row at the same time. Get both rooks onto the seventh and the game is usually over.

Back-rank mate

This is the most common checkmate in club chess and the reason it happens is always the same. A castled king sits on g8 with three unmoved pawns in front of him. A rook arrives on the eighth rank, checks, and the king has nowhere to go, because the only squares he could use are occupied by his own pawns.

The cure costs one move: push a pawn, usually h7 to h6, so the king has a hole to step into. It is called making luft, from the German for air. Do it in a quiet moment, before the rook shows up, and look for the same weakness on the other side of the board.

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