The queen (♕,♛) is the most powerful piece in the game of chess, able to move any number of squares vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Each player starts the game with one queen, placed in the middle of the first rank next to the king. With the chessboard oriented correctly, the white queen starts on a white square and the black queen on a black square. (Thus the mnemonics "queen gets her color", or "queen on color", or "queen on her own color".) In algebraic notation, the white queen starts on d1 and the black queen starts on d8. Because the queen is the most powerful piece, when a pawn is promoted it is almost always promoted to a queen.
In the game shatranj, an ancestor of chess, the queen was a fairly weak piece called a fers or vizier, only able to move or capture one step diagonally. The modern queen's move arose in 15th-century Europe.
The piece is archaically known as the minister. In Polish it is known as the Hetman – the name of a major historical military-political office. In Russian it is known as "ferz'" (ферзь).
Movement
The queen can be moved any number of unoccupied squares in a straight line vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, thus combining the moves of the rook and bishop. The queen captures by occupying the square on which an enemy piece sits.
Although both players start with one queen each, a player can promote a pawn to any of several types of pieces, including a queen, when the pawn is moved to the player's furthest rank (the opponents first rank). Such a queen created by promotion can be an additional queen, or if the player's queen has been captured, a replacement queen. Pawn promotion to a queen is colloquially called queening, which is by far the most common type of piece a pawn is promoted to because of the relative power of a queen.
Piece value
Ordinarily the queen is slightly more powerful than a rook and a bishop together, while slightly less powerful than two rooks. It is almost always disadvantageous to exchange the queen for a piece other than the enemy's queen.
The reason the queen is more powerful than a combination of a rook and bishop, even though they control the same number of squares, is twofold. First, the queen is a more mobile unit than the rook and bishop, as the entire power of the queen can be transferred to another location in one move, while transferring the entire firepower of a rook and bishop requires two moves. Second, the queen is not hampered by the bishop's inability to control squares of the opposite color to the square on which it stands. A factor in favor of the rook and bishop is that they can attack (or defend) a square twice, while a queen can only do so only once, but experience has shown that this factor is usually less significant than the points favoring the queen.[1]
The queen is at her most powerful when the board is open, when the enemy king is not well-defended, or when there are loose (i.e. undefended) pieces in the enemy camp. Because of her long range and ability to move in multiple directions, the queen is well-equipped to execute forks. Compared to other long range pieces (i.e. rooks and bishops) the queen is less restricted and more powerful also in closed positions.
Strategy
Because the queen is the most powerful piece, many times beginners develop it as quickly as possible, in the hope of plundering the enemy position and possibly even delivering an early checkmate (such as Scholar's mate). However, being the most powerful piece also means the queen is the most valuable, and an attack on her is usually considered a serious threat. A drawback of the queen is that she is easily harassed, and if developed too early will often be vulnerable to attacks by weaker pieces. This forces the player to either retreat her or ultimately exchange her for a piece of lesser value. Since retreating the queen consumes one or more moves, the opponent can use the time to advantageously develop his own pieces.
Experienced players generally prefer to delay developing the queen, and instead use their minor pieces in the opening. An early queen attack is rare in high level chess, as experienced opponents will avoid immediate mating threats such as Scholar's Mate.
Nonetheless, there are some openings with early queen development that are sometimes used by high level players. The Scandinavian Defense, which in the main line features queen moves by Black on the second and third moves, is considered sound and has been played at world championship level. The Scandinavia is usually an option for Black to avoid some heavily analysed openings, such as the Ruy Lopez or the Sicilian Defence. Some less common openings have been tried too, such as the Parham Attack (1.e4 e5 2.Qh5!?), which is widely considered a chess opening suitable only for beginners, but has occasionally been played by the strong American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura.[2]
Often a queen exchange marks the beginning of the endgame; but there are queen endgames, and sometimes queens are exchanged in the opening, long before the endgame. A common goal in pawn endgames is to promote a pawn to a queen. As the queen has the largest range and mobility, queen and king vs. lone king is any easy win when compared to some other basic mates.
Queen sacrifice
A queen sacrifice is the deliberate sacrifice of a queen in order to gain a more favorable tactical position.
History
The queen was originally the fers (counsellor or prime minister) and had a quite different movement. In Persia it was called the farzin and later the firz. Initially it could move only one square diagonally. About 1300 its move was enhanced to allow it to jump two squares diagonally, which was the same move as the bishop at the time. For a while it was also allowed to jump like a knight once in the game, somewhat analogous to castling for the king. This rule was used in Turkey and Russia until the 18th Century.
The feminization of the fers into the queen arose over time. Some surviving early medieval pieces depict the piece as a queen, and the word fers became grammatically feminized in several languages, for example alferza in Spanish and fierce or fierge in French,[3] prior to its replacement with names such as reine or dame (lady). The Carmina Burana also refer to the queen as femina (woman) and coniunx (spouse),[4] and the name Amazon has sometimes been seen.[5] (The amazon is sometimes used as a fairy chess piece that can move as a queen or a knight.[6])
In Russian it keeps its Persian name of ferz to this day; koroleva or queen is colloquial and is never used by professional chess players. However the names koroleva, tsaritsa (empress), and baba (old woman) are attested as early as 1694.[7] In Arabic countries the queen remains termed, and in some cases depicted as, a vizier.[8]
Historian Marilyn Yalom proposes that the prominence of medieval queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Blanche of Castile, the cult of the Virgin Mary,[4] points to a surviving chess queen representing the Virgin, as well as medieval poetry depicting the Virgin as the chess-queen of God or Fierce Dieu,[9] and the power ascribed to women in the troubadour tradition of courtly love, might have been partly responsible for influencing the piece towards its identity as a queen and its extraordinary power on the board, as might the medieval popularity of chess as a game particularly suitable for women to play on equal terms with men.[10] Significantly, the earliest surviving treatise to describe the modern movement of the queen (as well as the bishop and pawn), Repetición de amores e arte de axedres con CL iuegos de partido (Discourses on Love and the Art of Chess with 150 Problems) by Luis Ramírez de Lucena, was published during the reign of Isabella I of Castile.[11] Well before the queen's powers expanded, it was already being romantically described as essential to the king's survival, so that when the queen was lost, there was nothing more of value on the board.[12]
During the 16th century the queen's move took its modern form as a combination of the move of the rook and the current move of the bishop.[13] Starting from Spain, this new version - called "queen's chess" (scacchi de la donna), or pejoratively "madwoman's chess" (schacchi alla rabiosa) - spread throughout Europe rapidly, partly due to the advent of the printing press and the popularity of new books on chess.[14] The new rules faced a misogynistic backlash in some quarters, ranging from anxiety over a powerful female warrior figure to frank abuse against women in general.[15]
At various times, the ability of pawns to be queened was restricted while the original queen was still on the board, so as not to cause scandal by providing the king with more than one queen. An early twelfth-century Latin poem refers to a queened pawn as a ferzia, as opposed to the original queen or regina, to account for this.[16]
Unicode
Unicode defines two codepoints for queen:
♕ U+2655 White Chess Queen (HTML ♕)
♛ U+265B Black Chess Queen (HTML ♛)
See also
Notes
References
- Brace, Edward R. (1977), An Illustrated Dictionary of Chess, Hamlyn Publishing Group, pp. 230, 231, ISBN 1-55521-394-4
- Barden, Leonard (1980), Play better CHESS with Leonard Barden, Octopus Books Limited, p. 10, ISBN 0-7064-0967-1
- Davidson, Henry (1981), A Short History of Chess (1949), McKay, ISBN 0-679-14550-8
- Golombek, Harry (1977), Golombek's Encyclopedia of Chess, Crown Publishing, ISBN 0-517-53146-1
- Hooper, David; Whyld, Kenneth (1992), The Oxford Companion to Chess (second ed.), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-280049-3
- Sunnucks, Anne (1970), The Encyclopaedia of Chess (second ed.), St. Martins Press, ISBN 978-0709146971
- Yalom, Marilyn (2004), Birth of the Chess Queen: A History (2nd. ed.), Perennial, ISBN 0-06-009065-0
- Dickins, Anthony (1971), A guide to fairy chess (first ed.), Doven, ISBN 0486226875
External links
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