Why is the knight written N when it starts with a K?

Because the king already took K, and there is only one king to keep track of. N is simply the next usable letter in the word. Other languages solve it their own way: the laws let you write the first letter of the piece name in your own language, so a German scoresheet has S for Springer, and magazines dodge the problem by printing small pictures of the pieces instead of letters.

What do the three dots in 1...e5 mean?

They mean the move belongs to Black. A full pair is written 1.e4 e5, but when Black's move is quoted on its own, or a variation begins with it, the dots stand in for the missing White move. So 1...e5 is Black's reply to White's first move, and 24...Rxd4 is Black's twenty-fourth. You will see them constantly in books and in puzzle solutions.

Do I need to know notation to play chess?

Not to play a game with a friend across a kitchen table. You need it for everything else: books, puzzle solutions, following a broadcast, writing your moves down in a tournament, and getting an engine to explain what you missed. It takes about twenty minutes to learn and it is the best twenty minutes a new player can spend.

How to read chess notation

1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nc6 3.Qh5 Nf6 4.Qxf7# is a whole chess game. Four moves each, and Black is checkmated. By the bottom of this page you will read that line the way you read a phone number, because there are only three things in it: the name of a square, a capital letter for a piece, and a handful of small marks.

Where that game starts, with the address system printed round the edge: file letters along the bottom, rank numbers up the right-hand side.

Every square has an address

The columns are files, lettered a to h from White’s left. The rows are ranks, numbered 1 to 8 starting at White’s edge of the board. A square is its file letter and then its rank number, in lower case, with nothing in between: e4, f7, a1, h8.

The bit that catches people is that the names never turn round. Black’s king starts on e8, and it is e8 on Black’s scoresheet too (FIDE Laws, Appendix C.4 and C.5). One map, both players. Playing Black feels back to front for about a week, and then it stops.

Learn two squares tonight and the rest arrive with use. e4, because more games begin with a pawn going there than anywhere else. And f7, defended by nothing but the black king at the start, which is where the game below ends. The full map, with a board to test yourself against, is on how the squares are named.

The pieces are letters, the pawn is silence

K is the king, Q the queen, R the rook, B the bishop, N the knight. The knight gets N because K had already gone.

A move is that letter plus the square the piece arrives on. Nf3: a knight went to f3. Bc4, Qh5, Rd1, Kg1. You are not told where the piece came from and you do not need to be, because in almost any position only one knight can reach f3. In the rare case where two can, one extra letter sorts it out and you get Nbd2, which has a page of its own.

Pawns get no letter at all, and that absence is how you spot them (Appendix C.3). So e4 means a pawn went to e4, h3 means a pawn went to h3, and any move without a capital in front of it was made by a pawn. Nobody writes P.

The letters are not international, incidentally. The laws let each player use the initials of their own language, so a German player writes Sf3 for the knight and a Russian one writes in Cyrillic. The squares, though, are the same everywhere on earth.

Five marks and you can read a chess book

x is a capture: Nxf3 is knight takes on f3. A pawn capture shows the file the pawn left instead of a letter: exd5.
+ is check: Qh5+. It always goes at the end of the move.
# is checkmate, and the game is over: Qxf7#.
O-O is castling on the king’s side (king e1 to g1, rook h1 to f1), O-O-O on the queen’s side.
=Q is a promotion: e8=Q is a pawn reaching e8 and turning into a queen.

Two more you will meet and can ignore for now. e.p. after a pawn capture means it was en passant. And ! or ? after a move is the annotator’s opinion of it, not part of what happened; every mark in use is listed on the notation symbols page.

Now read the game

Board in front of you, pieces set up, one move at a time.

1.e4, White’s e-pawn from e2 to e4. 1…e5, Black copies, and the three dots tell you the move is Black’s. 2.Bc4, the light-squared bishop from f1 to c4, where it stares at f7. 2…Nc6, a knight from b8 to c6. 3.Qh5, the queen from d1 to h5, and now two white pieces attack f7. 3…Nf6, and Black is lost.

That last move is worth a second. Nf6 defends h7, attacks the white queen and develops a knight, and does nothing whatever about f7. Black had to play 3…Qe7, guarding the square, or 3…g6, hitting the queen first. Getting this wrong once is a rite of passage, and there is a page on defending against Scholar’s mate because it is the first trap almost everybody meets.

4.Qxf7#.

Reading that took longer than playing it, which is the normal ratio at the start. Try the shorter one now: 1.f3 e5 2.g4 Qh4#, the fastest checkmate there is. Two moves, no captures, one symbol.

The shapes stop being letters and start being moves surprisingly quickly, and the way to get there is to read solutions rather than sentences. Go and solve half a dozen mate-in-one puzzles, reading each answer in notation before you play it. Then learn to write moves down, because sooner or later a tournament will ask you to.