Pawn En Passant and Promotion Rules in Chess
Pawns are also special in the game of chess. They're not just sacrificial or blocking pieces. They also have a mission. And they are mandated to always engage advancing enemy pawns on their initial move, not just by-pass them. In fact, they're the only pieces prohibited to retreat. Here is a summary of the special heroic roles of unsung pawns.
On their initial move, pawns cannot by-pass advancing enemy pawns. For instance, an enemy pawn has reached our territory—just 1 square away from the initial line up of our pawns. If we wish to stop it we may do so with a pawn. We send it on the square just in front of the enemy pawn. This means we move it a square forward to meet the coming enemy face to face.
But we cannot send a pawn 2 squares past the right or left of the enemy pawn. This is what they call "en passant" in chess. The enemy automatically captures our pawn in this case and occupies the square at the back of where our pawn was supposed to land—directly facing our initial row of pawns. Then, we simply capture the defiant enemy pawn with one from our first row of pawns. In this case, it's an equal loss. But the scenario changes if no ally pawn is available to capture the defiant enemy pawn. In this case, the enemy wins by a pawn.
A strategy to preserve our pawns is just stop the coming enemy pawn by sending a pawn to meet it face to face rather than engage it. Or, better still, we beat the opponent en passant in chess by sending more pawns in enemy territory a mere square away from the second row of pawns.
A number of pawns should also be preserved in the game so they can later be promoted to official ranks once they touch down on the eighth rank or first row of the enemy territory. This is pawn promotion in chess. A pawn that reaches the eighth rank (for enemy black pawns, the first rank) can turn into another queen or rook. If 3 or 4 of our pawns successfully touch-down we can have 3 more queens or rooks. Through pawn promotion in chess, we see how powerful pawns really are.
En passant in chess is a tool for helping our pawns make as many touch-downs as possible to effect as many pawn promotions in chess as possible.