Pawn Promotion: What Happens When a Pawn Reaches the End

What happens when a pawn reaches the other side of the board? Learn the pawn promotion rule, which pieces you can choose, and when to underpromote.

The humble pawn has a secret: if it survives the long walk to the other side of the board, it turns into a much stronger piece. This is called pawn promotion, and it is one of the most important rules in chess. Many games, especially in the endgame, are decided by who promotes a pawn first.

What is pawn promotion?

When one of your pawns reaches the last rank (the 8th rank for White, the 1st rank for Black), it must immediately be replaced by a queen, rook, bishop or knight of the same color. You choose which one. The new piece appears on the square where the pawn arrived and can be used from your very next move.

Promotion is part of the same move. You push the pawn to the last rank, swap it for the new piece, and that is your whole turn. The new piece works immediately: if it attacks the enemy king, that is check.

This is the rule in both the FIDE Laws of Chess (Article 3.7) and the US Chess rulebook, and it applies to every pawn, whether it walks to the last rank or gets there by capturing.

Which pieces can a pawn promote to?

You can choose any of these four pieces:

• Queen, the strongest piece and the right choice almost every time.
• Rook
• Bishop
• Knight

You cannot promote to a king, and the pawn cannot stay a pawn. You also cannot promote to a piece of your opponent's color.

It does not matter which pieces you still have. You can promote to a queen even if your original queen is still on the board, so it is possible to have two, three or even more queens at once. In theory a player could have nine queens.

Try it yourself

Promote the pawn on e7. When the piece picker appears, choose the queen.

What is underpromotion?

Promoting to anything other than a queen is called underpromotion. It sounds silly, since the queen can do everything a rook or bishop can do. But there are two situations where it matters:

1. To give a knight check or fork. The knight moves in a way the queen cannot. Promoting to a knight can give check and win material at the same time.
2. To avoid stalemate. Sometimes a new queen would leave the opponent with no legal moves, which is stalemate and only a draw. A rook does the same job without taking away the last free squares.

Here is a famous kind of example. Promoting to a queen does nothing special, but promoting to a knight gives check and attacks the black queen at the same time:

Promoting to a rook is the classic way to dodge stalemate. Here a new queen on c8 would take away every square from the black king, but a rook leaves it one, and then mates:

Underpromotion is rare, but it turns up in real games and in puzzles. Practice spotting it with our underpromotion puzzles, and the more common queen races with the pawn promotion puzzles.

How promotion works over the board

In a tournament game you physically take the pawn off the board and put the new piece on the promotion square. Under FIDE rules the move is complete when the new piece is released on the square, and you have chosen the piece when it touches the square.

What if you do not have a spare queen? Do not use an upside-down rook: in FIDE events it counts as a rook. Instead, stop the clock and ask the arbiter for a queen. In US Chess (USCF) events you may also pause the clock to get the right piece from the tournament director. Do not count on an upside-down rook being accepted as a queen in any rated game: ask first.

Online, a small menu pops up when your pawn reaches the last rank. Many sites, including Chessyo, let you turn on "auto-queen" in the settings if you always want a queen.

How promotion is written in notation

In algebraic notation, you write the destination square followed by the new piece, often with an equals sign: e8=Q or e8Q. If the promotion is also a capture, include the file the pawn came from, for example dxe8=N+. The plus sign means check, as with any other move.

Why promotion matters so much

Because a new queen is worth about nine pawns, an extra pawn in the endgame is often enough to win. That is why strong players fight hard over passed pawns (pawns with no enemy pawns in front of them or on the neighboring files). Once a passed pawn reaches the 7th rank, the defender usually has to give up a piece to stop it.

A few simple endgame ideas to remember:

• Push passed pawns, especially when the opposing king is far away.
• Use your king to escort the pawn to the promotion square.
• Rooks belong behind passed pawns, both your own and your opponent's.

Practicing basic checkmates with a queen and a rook will also make sure you can finish the game once the new queen arrives. For hands-on practice, the promotion lesson in our free rules course walks you through it move by move. Pawns have one more special capture, which often decides who gets there first: en passant.