En Passant in Chess: The Exact Rule, with Examples

En passant is a special pawn-takes-pawn capture: when a pawn advances two squares from its starting square and lands beside an enemy pawn, that enemy pawn may capture it as if it had moved only one square. The capturing pawn goes to the square the other one skipped over, and the captured pawn is removed from the board. It can only be done on the very next move: if you do not take the chance then, the right is gone for good.

The exact rule, in three conditions

The FIDE Laws of Chess include it in the article that describes how the pawn moves. In practical terms, en passant is legal when all three of these are true at once:

1. Your pawn is on your fifth rank. For White, the 5th rank; for Black, the 4th. It is the only rank from which you can capture en passant, because it is the only one beside which a pawn that has made a double step can end up.
2. The enemy pawn has just advanced two squares from its starting square and landed on a file next to yours, right beside your pawn.
3. You capture on the very next move. Not two moves later, not "when I remember": the move immediately after the double step.

If all of that holds, your pawn moves diagonally to the square the enemy pawn passed over, as if it were capturing it there, and the enemy pawn disappears from the square it actually stopped on. It is the only capture in chess in which the captured piece is not on the square the capturing piece lands on, which is exactly why it confuses people.

An example from move one

The easiest way to see it is in a real opening. In the Alekhine Defence, White chases the knight with the pawn, and if Black answers with the double step of the d-pawn, en passant appears by itself:

After 2...d5, the black pawn passed through d6 and stopped on d5, next to the white pawn on e5. White captures en passant with 3.exd6: the pawn goes to d6, the square the black pawn skipped, and the pawn on d5 is taken off the board. In practice Black plays 2...Nd5 in that position precisely to avoid giving this away, but the line shows the rule as clearly as possible.

Black can capture en passant too, from their fourth rank. In this line the black pawn has reached d4, and White, without thinking, pushes the c-pawn two squares:

The white pawn on c2 passed through c3 on its way to c4, stopped beside the pawn on d4, and Black captures en passant with 3...dxc3. White loses nothing —they recapture with 4.Nxc3 or 4.bxc3— but it is worth noticing that en passant sometimes changes the pawn structure in a way the player who pushed had not foreseen.

Why the rule exists

In medieval chess the pawn always moved one square. The double step from the starting square was added to speed up the opening phase, and with it came a problem: a pawn could use the jump to slip past an enemy pawn without being exposed to capture, reaching a square the other pawn no longer controls.

En passant fixes that. It gives the pawn on the fifth rank back its control over the square the enemy pawn skipped: the double step is still allowed, but it cannot be used to dodge the pawn that was guarding that square. Without this rule passed pawns would be far easier to create, and pawn endings would be a different game.

For centuries not every country played it the same way. Italy, for example, only adopted it as an official rule in 1880, to bring its rules into line with the rest of international chess. Today it is universal: it is in the FIDE Laws and on every online platform.

What en passant is not: the common misunderstandings

Almost every argument about this rule comes from one of these mistakes:

• "You can capture en passant at any time." No. Only on the move immediately after the double step. If you play something else on that move, the enemy pawn is safe for good.
• "It works for any piece." No. Only a pawn captures en passant, and only another pawn. A knight or bishop attacking the skipped square cannot do anything special.
• "If the pawn moved one square twice, it still counts." No. It has to be a single two-square advance from the starting square. A pawn that reaches the same square in two moves cannot be captured en passant.
• "It is compulsory." No again. It is a right, like any capture. The only exception is the general rule: if it is your only legal move, you have to play it.
• "My pawn can be on any rank." Only on your own fifth rank. A white pawn on e4 cannot capture en passant a black pawn arriving on d5, because that pawn did not jump past the one on e4.

There is one more detail few people know: en passant follows the rules of any other move, so you cannot play it if it leaves your own king in check. The typical case is a horizontal pin, where removing both pawns from the same rank opens a line to the king:

The other way round, en passant can give check, and even mate, like any other capture. It is rare, but it happens, and it is one more reason to look at the whole position before dismissing an opponent's double step.

How to write it down and play it over the board

In algebraic notation it is written like an ordinary pawn capture: the file of the capturing pawn, an x and the square it lands on. In the first example, exd6. So that nobody looks for the captured pawn on d6, many books and scoresheets add "e.p." —short for the French en passant, "in passing", which is what it is called in almost every language—, but it is not required.

On a real board you do it with one hand: move your pawn to the skipped square and take the enemy pawn off. If you are learning to play with a clock, it is worth practising a couple of times, because it is easy to forget to remove the captured pawn. Online there is no such problem: the platform handles it as soon as you move the pawn to the skipped square.

The rule also matters somewhere few people expect: threefold repetition. Under the Laws, two positions are the same only if the pieces stand on the same squares and the possible moves are the same. If en passant was possible in one of them and no longer is in the other, they are not the same position, even if the board looks identical.

Where it shows up in real games

En passant is not a textbook curiosity. It appears every time one side has an advanced pawn on the fifth rank and the other wants to break the chain with a double step. The most common example is in the Advance Variation of the French Defence, when Black hits the e5 pawn with ...f5:

White is not obliged to capture, but doing so changes the structure completely: the e5 pawn that was cramping Black disappears, and Black gets a free centre plus an e6 pawn that may become weak. Choosing between keeping the chain and capturing en passant is a strategic decision, not a formality. To understand why a structure changes so much with a single pawn exchange, the main ones are in pawn structures.

In endgames it matters even more. A pawn that reaches the fifth rank while the enemy pawn beside it is still on its starting square can no longer be dodged by the double step, and that changes the count of who queens first. If you are learning the basic endings, it pays to go over the opposition and the endgames you must know with this rule in mind.

How to learn it once and for all

• Set it up on the board. Put a white pawn on e5 and a black pawn on d7 and play ...d5. Then try with the white pawn on e4 and you will see why it does not work there.
• Repeat the three conditions until they come out on their own: fifth rank, enemy double step beside you, very next move.
• Look for it in your games. Every time your opponent makes a double step next to one of your advanced pawns, ask yourself whether capturing suits you. In time it becomes automatic.

En passant is one of the rules you learn together with castling and promotion, and if you are just starting, how to learn chess from scratch sets out the order in which to study everything else. And once the rules are no longer the problem, the course Masterclass Chess: Ideas, Plans and Sacrifices works on the Advance variations and pawn expansions, which is exactly where these decisions become strategic.