Captures

Home * Chess * Moves * Captures

Captures are tactical moves changing material balance where an opponent piece is removed from the board as part of the completion of the move. This is either done by moving a piece to a square, which is occupied by the opponent captured piece - or as a special case of pawn takes pawn, en passant.

Winning captures are those with least valuable aggressor of most valuable victim, where even a recapture would win material, and captures of pieces en prise, that is the union of undefended (hanging) pieces, as well as pieces defended inadequately. A static exchange evaluation might be applied to determine a victim is en prise or not. Equal captures are exchanges of equal valued pieces. Winning, as well as equal captures are subject of quiescence search. Some programs extend captures or recaptures under certain conditions, i.e. material becomes close to the root score again.

=Capture Generation= With mailbox like square centric board representations, capture generation requires a so called blocker loop, while bitboards rely on attack generation and intersection with the set of opponent pieces.

=Six times Take Five=

=See also=
 * Algebraic Chess Notation - Captures
 * Capture Extensions
 * Capture (program) by Sylvain Renard
 * Material
 * MVV-LVA
 * Promotions
 * Quiescence Search
 * Recapture Extensions
 * Static Exchange Evaluation
 * Tactical Moves

=Forum Posts=
 * a question about the definition of winning capture in Rebel(diagrams) by Uri Blass, CCC, January 05, 2003
 * Reducing/Pruning Bad Captures (SEE < 0) by Edsel Apostol, CCC, August 19, 2011 » Pruning, Reductions, SEE
 * Perft and Captures by CDaley11, OpenChess Forum, January 24, 2013 » Perft
 * Sorting Captures by David Cimbalista, CCC, August 03, 2016 » Move Ordering
 * Ordering Capture Moves by Jason Fernandez, CCC, September 06, 2017 » Move Ordering - Captures

=External Links=
 * Capture (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * Dave Brubeck Quartet - Take Five (Paul Desmond) YouTube Video

Up one Level