What exactly is the deal with notation?
Notation is a form of chess short-hand used by players and others involved with the game to maintain a record of games played. Though there are a considerable number of forms of chess notation there are two main ones used: standard notation, which is sometimes called coordinate or algebraic notation, and descriptive notation. The key differences between these two forms of notation are that the former, which is that generally used for professional tournaments and in magazines, defines the moves according to one way of looking at the board (from White’s point of view), whereas the latter form is always written from the point of view of each army. That is, the White army’s moves are noted from the White point of view and the Black army’s moves from the Black point of view. A third form which one might encounter is international numeric notation, which is very similar to standard notation except it only uses numbers and thus avoids language barriers. There will be more on this later as I w
