Special moves

Can any piece capture en passant?

Updated · Sergei Tovmasian

Short answer

No. Only a pawn can capture en passant, and it can only capture an enemy pawn that has just advanced two squares. A rook or queen sitting on the same rank as the arriving pawn has no such right, and no piece can ever be captured en passant, however it got to the square.

There is a rook on b5, directly beside the black pawn that has just landed on c5, and the rook can do precisely nothing about it. The pawn on d5 can.

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Black has just played c7-c5. The rook on b5 sits right next to the pawn and has no capture; the pawn on d5 plays dxc6 and takes it.

Same rank, same distance, same pawn, two completely different rights. The rook can move to c6 if it likes, and it will land on an empty square and capture nothing at all, because c6 is only a capture square for a pawn taking in passing.

Pawn takes pawn, and that is the whole sentence

En passant lives in Article 3.7 of the FIDE Laws, the article that describes how the pawn moves. Nothing in it mentions any other piece. So:

A rook, bishop, knight, queen or king standing beside the arriving pawn has no en passant capture. It has whatever ordinary moves it has and nothing extra.

A piece can never be captured en passant. If your opponent slides a rook two squares past your pawn, that is a rook move, and rooks are allowed to walk past pawns.

The capturing pawn has to be yours and has to be on its fifth rank, which is rank 5 for White and rank 4 for Black. A pawn on the sixth rank looking at the same event gets nothing.

Why people think a rook can do it

Two places, going by the questions I get.

The first is the word capture. People read en passant as a special kind of capture, and then reason that any piece which can capture might be able to do this one. It is better understood the other way round: it is a special kind of pawn move, and capturing is what pawns do diagonally anyway. The pawn is not doing something new, it is doing its normal diagonal capture one move late.

The second is that the skipped square looks unusual. On d6 there is no piece, yet a pawn moving there takes something. That feels like a property of the square rather than of the pawn, and if it were a property of the square then anything landing on it should collect the prize. It is not. It is a one-move right that belongs to one specific pawn, recorded as a single field in the FEN and cleared on the next half-move.

For the four conditions in order, see the en passant rules; to drill the pattern until your eye finds it without being asked, the en passant puzzles are the fastest way there.

More questions

Can a king capture en passant?

No. The king captures like any other piece, by moving onto the square its target occupies, and only if that square is not defended. En passant is written into the pawn article of the Laws and applies to pawns alone. A king standing on b5 next to a pawn arriving on c5 can take on c5 in the ordinary way if the pawn is undefended, but that is a normal capture, not en passant.

Can a pawn capture a piece en passant if the piece moved two squares?

No. A rook sliding from c1 to c5 has not made a two-square pawn advance, and no pawn may take it as it passes. Only a pawn's own double step from its home rank creates the right, and only an enemy pawn on the adjacent file, standing on its fifth rank, holds that right.

Go deeper

Castling, en passant and promotion all have their own tactics. Drill them in the app.

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