Open a PGN file in a text editor and you can read the whole thing without any chess software at all:
[Event "Coaching game"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "2026.02.11"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Sergei"]
[Black "Student"]
[Result "1-0"]
1. e4 e5 2. Bc4 Nc6 3. Qh5 Nf6 4. Qxf7# 1-0That is the entire file: seven lines of tags, a blank line, the moves, and the result on the end. PGN stands for Portable Game Notation, the specification was pinned down in 1994, and it has barely moved since, which is why a game exported from any website today opens in any chess program you own.
The tags
Those seven are the Seven Tag Roster, and they always turn up, in that order, in that shape: Event, Site, Date, Round, White, Black, Result. A question mark stands in for anything unknown. The date is written year first with full stops, 2026.02.11, so that a folder of games sorts itself.
Everything else is optional and there is plenty of it: an opening code, both players’ ratings, the time control, how the game ended. Two of the extras matter to a beginner. If a game does not start from the normal position, a FEN tag carries the position it starts from and a SetUp tag says to use it, which is how whole puzzle collections travel around as PGN files.
The movetext
Everything after the blank line is one long stream of algebraic notation. Move number, full stop, White’s move, Black’s move, and the line breaks mean nothing at all: a reader is meant to ignore where one line ends and the next begins.
Three extras hide in there. Curly brackets hold a comment, which is where a website stashes your clock times. Round brackets hold an alternative line, so a variation can sit inside the main game and nest inside itself. A dollar sign followed by a number is a numeric annotation glyph, the machine-readable version of ! and ?.
The last thing in the movetext is the result again: 1-0, 0-1, 1/2-1/2, or * if there is not one yet. Plain characters only, so a draw is 1/2-1/2 rather than the ½-½ you write on a scoresheet.
What to do with one
Copy your game from whichever site you played it on, paste it into an analysis board, and it plays back. That is the everyday use and it takes ten seconds.
The better use is duller. PGN files simply stack: one game after another with a blank line between, so your last hundred games fit in a single file you can search. Then you get to look at what actually happens to you rather than what you remember happening, and what turns up is nearly always the same few blunders in the same few shapes.
If you remember one thing about the format, make it this: it is plain text. You can read it, fix a typo in it, email it, paste it into a forum post. The same is true of FEN, which is the same idea shrunk down to a single position.