Pawn Promotion

You learnt earlier that you can only move your pawns forward and never backwards. Now, you will learn a very good reason for only moving them forward anyway, because if you finally manage to move a pawn all the way forward as far as the eight rank, then you can swap it for a piece of higher value, either a knight, a bishop, a rook or a queen!

This is called pawn promotion as the pawn basically gets promoted to a better piece as a reward for reaching the eight and final rank. In fact, even if you don't want to, you must promote the pawn to a different piece, as you are not allowed to leave a pawn standing on the eight rank!

So, if it is your turn to move and you have a pawn on the seventh rank which can be moved to the eight rank, you simply move the pawn forward to the eight rank and then replace it with a piece of your choice, either a knight, bishop, rook or queen. Not a king, though! You are only allowed to have one king!

Things are even better if your last pawn move is a capture, as you manage to both capture an enemy piece with your pawn, and then promote the pawn. That is the best move in chess, especially if you manage to capture an enemy queen and then promote your pawn to a queen itself!

Almost always, you will choose to promote your pawn to a queen, as that is the strongest piece of all. However, when you read about stalemate later, you will learn that sometimes it may be better to promote the pawn to another piece instead. Fortunately, promoting to a queen is almost always the best choice.

There is no limit to the number of pawns you can promote. You started with eight pawns so you could possibly manage to promote the whole lot! Though it is very unlikely to happen as your opponent would surely have had enough and resigned once you have managed to promote the first one or two pawns!

Pawn promotion usually only occurs towards the end of a game, as there may not be many pieces left on the board and so the route to the eight rank is free of obstacles. It is not worth trying to promote a pawn at the beginning of a game as your opponent still has a lot of fighting pieces and would have little trouble capturing the pawn once it gets too close. A better plan is to try and capture the enemy pieces first so that, once the route is fairly clear, you could try moving the pawn forward and going for the promotion.