Is Chess a Contact Sport?
Full-contact, semi-contact, limited-contact, or non-contact?
And if we agreed there's some sort of contact between chess pieces, in how many different kind of contact two opposing chessmen get during chess battles?
In a full-contact sport like football there exist many different kind of contact between players, like tackling, blocking, passing, dribbling (soccer), etc.
How about chess? There is no physical contact between players themselves. Their chessmen don't get into physical contact either (unless at the time of piece trade, when, depending on your style of capturing, two men may get into a physical contact). The only way a chessman affects enemy pieces is through the use of striking power where an attacked piece can be taken out and sent back to the box till next one.
At the end of this post, we'll see there's ONE AND ONLY ONE kind of contact between two chess pieces.
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B. Leonov, Mag 64 #3 1989
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Four Basic Piece Relationships as per GM Averbakh
In his Chess Middlegames: Essential Knowledge (Cadogan, London 1996) and Schachtaktik für Fortgeschrittene, Berlin 1983, Chess Tactics for Advanced Players), the oldest living Grandmaster Yuri Averbakh explains four elementary piece contacts, Attack, Restriction, Protection, and Pin. Sometimes he's considering Threat of attack as another basic piece relation, too.
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Here are the elementary contacts chessmen get into,
Black's Rook is attacking the pawn
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White's King is restricted in movement to three squares on the e-file
White's rook is "protecting" the pawn
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Black's Rook is pinning down the white Bishop
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Apparently a non-existent piece contact in the art of Ali Akbar Sadeghi (Iranian)
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Chess: Game of ONLY ONE Contact
It can be easily seen that restriction is just inability (in case of absolute pin), or inconvenience to move due to the firing power of an enemy piece (as a contact would be established and the attacked piece annihilated).
In the case of protection above, we see that after Black's Rook capturing White's pawn, this position would arise
when an attacking relation between the remaining pieces has just been made.
The last elementary contact per Averbakh is pin (or interference, or blocking, or covering). Actually, it is just a double attack consisting of the generic R -> B attacking contact, and the R -> Q threat of attack (a direct attack being one move away as it would take place in case the Bishop vacated its current position).
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No matter how chess rules may be found extremely simple, piece interactions on the board emerge into very complex and intricate positions. It's an inherent characteristic of all complex (emergent) systems, one of which is our beloved game.
Yet, any position ever found on the chessboard has just been a composite made up of many simple generic attacking piece contacts.
Spassky - Tal, Moscow 1959 (after 26...Nc4-d6) Can you spot all piece contacts here? (39 contacts, w/o restriction, if I'm not mistaken)
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Yet, no dribbling...
Perhaps, in a new chess variant you invented
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Further reading on piece relationships:
PRINCIPIA SCACCHORUM, Part 11: On Relations, the Very Fabric of (Chess) Life
