It’s a chess move you don’t hear of very often. It’s not as popular as that thing you do with the little castles.

“En pbumant (from French: “in pbuming”Log in to see images! is a move in the board game of chess. En pbumant is a special capture made immediately after a player moves a pawn two squares forward from its starting position, and an opposing pawn could have captured it if it had only moved one square forward. In this situation, the opposing pawn may, on the immediately subsequent move, capture the pawn as if taking it “as it pbumes” through the first square; the resulting position would then be the same as if the pawn had only moved one square forward and the opposing pawn had captured normally. The En pbumant capture must be done on the very next turn, or the right to do so is lost.[1]

Such a move is the only occasion in chess in which a piece captures but does not move to the square of the captured piece. When claiming a draw by threefold repetition, two positions whose pieces are all on the same squares, with the same player to move, are considered different if there was an opportunity to make an en pbumant capture in the first position, because that opportunity by definition no longer exists the second time the same configuration of pieces occurs.

In either algebraic or descriptive chess notation, en pbumant captures are sometimes denoted by “e.p.” or similar, but such notation is not required. In algebraic notation, the move is written as if the captured pawn just advanced only one square, e.g, exf6 (or exf6 e.p.) in the illustration below.”

The important question is why in any chess game you would ever run into that situation.

And here I thought you were an avid opponent of plagiarism, Celery.

Shii Posted:

And here I thought you were an avid opponent of plagiarism, Celery.

That’s why I invented the quotation mark.

Simon Groothuizen Posted:

Au contraire!

The en pbumant rule hardly comes up in games between beginners as they often “hang” pieces and the right of one pawn to pbum another hardly alters the result of the game.

Yet it is essential to the very backbone of chess: the pawn endgame. Let’s take a look at this example position:

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Black’s pawn is under attack and cannot flee: for if it were to move up two spaces it were to be taken en pbumant. Hence the position is lost for black. However, without the en pbumant rule, he could equalize:

1… f5

2.g6 f4

3.g7 f3

4.g8=Q f2

with a theoretical draw.

Somehow I am not surprised you know this.

Dupin Posted:

Somehow I am not surprised you know this.

Well I do teach chess to children, I better know my stuff!