There are other notation systems you may come across from time to time. Spanish descriptive, Russian descriptive, or German descriptive are all very similar to English descriptive except that the piece symbols will correspond to the names of the pieces in those languages.

There is a special international correspondence notation system that is the simplest of all: Each square is assigned two numbers (both ranks and files are numbered) and moves are described as the square a piece or pawn has vacated and the square it moves to.

Forsyth Notation

There are notation systems for describing a chess position without bothering with the moves that led up to it. One such is Forsyth notation, in which each White piece or pawn is given as a capital letter and each Black piece or pawn as a lowercase letter. Empty squares are indicated by a number according to how many empty squares there are.

Chess notation, like music notation or mathematics notation, is quite specialized. It also has become standardized and even automatic with the rise of software, chess-playing computers, and the Internet. Thus you can read and write a universal language when you know chess notation.

Forsyth positions are set up like a diagram, with the White pieces at the bottom and the Black pieces at the top. Each row consists of a rank, starting with the eighth rank and continuing down to the first rank.

The final checkmate in the game we have been discussing looks like this in Forsyth notation:

Another Position Notation

Of course, it's just as easy to simply describe the pieces that are on the board and the squares they are on. Again, using the same checkmate position:

There is one other type of chess notation: Braille. Yes, blind people can and do play chess. They don't play “blindfold,” however, like a master at an exhibition. Instead, they use special boards and pieces that they are allowed to touch at all times, since their fingers are their eyes. They record and read chess games in Braille notation.