En passant: the strangest legal move in chess, explained
En passant is a special pawn capture — and it's the one rule that makes new players stop and stare at the board, convinced their opponent just cheated. It looks impossible: a pawn captures another pawn that isn't even on the square it's attacking. But it's completely legal, it's been in the rules for centuries, and once you've seen it work twice it stops being mysterious.
This guide covers exactly what en passant is, the precise conditions that have to be true for it to happen, a worked example you can follow move by move, why the rule was invented, and the misconceptions that trip up nearly everyone. If pawns themselves are still new to you, our guide to chess piece names covers how the pawn moves and captures first — that's worth a look before this.
What is en passant?
En passant is French for "in passing," and that phrase is the whole idea. When an enemy pawn tries to rush past yours by moving two squares in one go, you're allowed to capture it as if it had only moved one square — as if you'd caught it in passing.
Here's the plain-English version: if an opponent's pawn jumps two squares forward and lands right next to your pawn, you can capture it on the very next move, taking it diagonally into the square it skipped over. Your pawn ends up where the enemy pawn would have been if it had moved just one square instead of two.
That's it. The strangeness is only that your pawn doesn't land on the captured pawn's square — it lands on the empty square behind it, and the enemy pawn is removed anyway.
The en passant rule: all four conditions
This is where beginners go wrong, so it's worth being exact. En passant is legal only when all four of these are true at the same time:
| # | Condition | | --- | --- | | 1 | Your pawn is on its 5th rank (the fifth row from your side). | | 2 | An enemy pawn on an adjacent file moves two squares forward in a single move. | | 3 | That pawn lands directly beside yours — right next to it, on the same rank. | | 4 | You capture immediately, on your very next move — or you lose the right forever. |
Miss any one of them and en passant isn't available. Your pawn has to already be advanced to its fifth rank. The enemy pawn has to make the two-square jump — a one-square move never triggers it. And the timing is unforgiving: the option exists for exactly one move and then vanishes.
A worked example, move by move
Numbers make this concrete. Follow it on a board if you have one nearby.
- You're playing White. You have a pawn on e5 — it's reached your fifth rank. So far, so normal.
- Your opponent plays d7–d5: their d-pawn jumps two squares forward in one move and lands on d5, right beside your e5 pawn.
- Notice what they were trying to do — by jumping two squares, that pawn skipped over d6, the square your e5 pawn attacks. It's trying to slip past you.
- En passant says you can capture it anyway. You play exd6: your e5 pawn moves diagonally to d6, and the black pawn on d5 is removed from the board.
Your pawn finishes on d6 — the square the enemy pawn jumped over — and the pawn that was on d5 is gone. That's a full, legal capture. If you play it on any later move instead of right now, it's simply illegal.
Why does en passant exist?
En passant looks like a random exception, but it exists to fix a specific problem — and knowing the history makes it click.
For most of chess history, pawns moved only one square at a time. Later, the rules were changed to let a pawn move two squares on its first move, to speed up the opening. That change created a loophole. Imagine your pawn is sitting on its fifth rank, controlling the two diagonal squares in front of it, guarding the way through. Under the old one-square rule, an enemy pawn creeping up beside it would have to pass through a square your pawn attacked — and you could capture it there.
The new two-square move let that enemy pawn leap right over the guarded square in a single bound, arriving safely alongside your pawn without ever being exposed to the capture. That felt wrong: a rule meant to speed things up was letting pawns dodge captures they should have faced.
En passant restores the balance. It says: if a pawn uses the two-square jump to skip past a square your pawn was guarding, you may still capture it as though it had moved only one square. The pawn gets its fast start, but it can't use that start to sneak by untouched.
How to write en passant in notation
There's nothing special to learn here, which surprises people. En passant is written exactly like any other pawn capture: the file your pawn started on, an x, and the square it lands on.
In the example above, White's capture is written exd6 — "e-pawn takes on d6." Not "exd5," even though the captured pawn was sitting on d5, because notation always records the square your pawn moves to, and your pawn lands on d6.
Some books and scoresheets add e.p. afterwards — you'll see exd6 e.p. — purely as a flag so a reader knows it was an en passant capture and doesn't think there was a piece on d6. The tag is optional and increasingly rare; the move is complete and unambiguous without it. If notation itself is still new, our guide to chess notation walks through how every move is written.
Misconceptions that trip everyone up
Almost every en passant argument comes down to one of these four misunderstandings:
- "You can do it any time." No — only on the move immediately after the two-square jump. There's no general power to capture pawns sideways. Miss the moment and it's gone.
- "It only counts against a two-square pawn move." True, and worth stating positively: a pawn that moves one square, or a pawn that moved two squares several turns ago, can't be taken en passant. It has to be that jump, on that turn.
- "Any piece can do it." No. En passant is strictly a pawn-versus-pawn affair. Only a pawn can capture en passant, and only a two-square pawn move can trigger it. A knight or bishop parking next to your pawn does nothing.
- "It's forced — I have to take." No. Like nearly every capture, en passant is your choice. Sometimes taking is best, sometimes ignoring it is. What expires is the right to capture, not an obligation.
Where en passant fits in the bigger picture
En passant is one of a handful of special rules that don't fit the "pieces move in straight lines" mental model — castling and pawn promotion are the others. They all feel like exceptions until you meet them in a real game, and then they're second nature.
If you're still assembling the basics, it's worth having the rest in place: our how to play chess guide covers the full rules from the ground up, and chess board setup makes sure your pawns are starting on the right squares in the first place — because en passant only ever happens once a pawn has marched all the way to its fifth rank. Get there, watch for the two-square jump beside it, and you'll spot your first en passant sooner than you think.