En Passant
En passant is a special pawn-capture rule. When an opponent's pawn advances two squares from its starting rank and lands beside your pawn, you may capture it diagonally - but only on the very next move. The phrase is French for "in passing," and the rule was introduced to stop pawns from using their two-square advance to dodge an adjacent capture.
Here is the moment en passant happens (White to move). Black has just played ...d5, advancing the pawn two squares to land on d5, directly beside White's e5 pawn. White captures with exd6 - but the capturing pawn lands on d6, the square the black pawn skipped over, not d5 where the pawn actually sits. Capturing on the passed square, not the arrival square, is what sets en passant apart from every other capture.
Definition
- The capturing pawn must stand on the 5th rank (for White) or the 4th rank (for Black).
- The opposing pawn must have just advanced two squares on its previous move and landed on the square directly beside your pawn.
- The right exists for one move only. Playing any other move forfeits it permanently.
- The capturing pawn moves diagonally to the square the opposing pawn skipped over, and the captured pawn is removed from the board.
Why the Rule Exists
Originally, every pawn moved one square at a time. When the two-square first move was added, players could evade adjacent capture by leaping past the square an enemy pawn was poised to attack. To preserve the older capture geometry, en passant was introduced: a pawn that skips past an adjacent enemy pawn can still be captured as if it had moved one square - but only at the next opportunity.
So en passant is a correction rule attached to the two-square advance rather than a separate invention.
Recognition Cues
- First, check that your pawn is on the 5th (White) or 4th rank (Black).
- Confirm that on the immediately preceding move, the opponent advanced an adjacent-file pawn two squares.
- Verify that the advancing pawn now sits directly next to your pawn (same rank, adjacent file).
- All three conditions must hold simultaneously for en passant to be available.
Example 1: Rule Demonstration
White's 3.exd6 is en passant. After 1.e4 e6, White advances 2.e5; Black answers 2...d5, advancing the d-pawn two squares to land beside the e5 pawn. White immediately plays 3.exd6, capturing the d5 pawn in passing. The capturing pawn moves to d6, and Black's d5 pawn is removed.
If White instead played any other third move, say 3.d4, the right to capture en passant would be lost permanently - Black's d5 pawn could not be taken this way on later moves.
Example 2: En Passant Double-Check Mate - Gundersen vs Faul (1928)
Because the capturing pawn leaves its original file, en passant can act as the trigger for a discovered attack. Below is a well-known example of a mate delivered by en passant (Gundersen vs Faul, Melbourne 1928). Black has just played ...g5 (a two-square push), and White captures with 15.hxg6 en passant. The g6 pawn itself gives no check. Instead, the h5 pawn's departure opens the h1 rook's file to the h6 king, and the removal of the g5 pawn opens the c1 bishop's diagonal: one en passant capture opens two lines at once, giving double check and mate. Step back (◀) to replay the whole game.
Pick a move, or step through with the arrow keys.
Moves
(Source: Gundersen vs A. H. Faul, Melbourne 1928 - public domain)
The same geometry can work against you. If your own pawn is pinned, you cannot take en passant even when the right exists, because capturing would expose your king. After any two-square push, check the lines that open on both sides once the capturing pawn leaves.
How often does it show up
Of the 212,300 puzzles in this site's database, 346 (0.2%) carry the en passant tag. That is rare next to common tags: the fork tag has 17,829 and the pin tag 13,506. It is not the rarest one on this site, though. Underpromotion has 32.
The rating spread is the unusual part. Not one of the 346 sits below rating 1200, and 67.3% sit above 1900. The lowest is 1307 and the highest 2542. Most tactics here keep a beginner band: forks 23.8% below 1200, pins 12.5%, skewers 35.7%, ordinary promotions 23.0%. Of the 52 tags whose sub-1200 band this site has measured (as of September 2026), exactly one other is also empty there, and it is castling. Both are special rules with a condition attached. Castling has only 61 puzzles, few enough that its zero could be chance; the 346 behind en passant's zero is harder to explain that way.
Be careful about what that zero means. The import filters puzzles by popularity and rating deviation, so a tag can come out empty in a band for reasons that have nothing to do with chess. What makes this case different is that the same filter left a beginner band intact for every tactic compared above, so the filter alone does not account for it.
A Lichess puzzle rating measures how many players got it wrong, not how deep the calculation runs. The move itself is one capture, and the rule is taught in the first week, which points toward noticing rather than calculating as the bottleneck: the capture is only legal for one move, and a player who does not look for it in that window never sees it. But this data can't cleanly separate that from two other explanations. First, selection: these puzzles were kept by the same popularity/rating-deviation filter as everything else on this site, not sampled to isolate the "spot en passant" skill on its own. Second, and visible in the five puzzles below, most of them don't stop at the capture - they carry a follow-up combination (a fork, a discovered check, an exchange sequence), and some of each puzzle's difficulty is ordinary calculation, not en passant recognition. The numbers are consistent with "hard to notice"; they don't rule out "hard to calculate what comes after."
One more number fits that reading. Of the 346, 19.4% also carry the discovered attack tag, the highest of the six tactic tags this measurement compares (fork, pin, skewer, deflection, discovered attack, sacrifice). When the pawn leaves its square, it uncovers a line. Roughly half sit in the middlegame (46.2%) and half in the endgame (47.4%), so this is not an endgame-only rule.
Practice: Real Puzzles
Every board below is an actual problem from this site's puzzle database. Try to find the move first, then step forward with ► and read the notes as each move plays. The number is the puzzle's rating - higher means fewer players solved it. The lowest of the five is 1333, against a corpus low of 1307. The missing beginner band shows up in this sample too.
1. Capture and check in one move (White to move, rating 1333)
Black has just pushed e7-e5, slipping past White's d5 pawn. It looks like "just win a pawn," but dxe6 does two things at once. The pawn lands on e6 and immediately checks Black's king on d7, so Black has to drop whatever it planned and answer the check (Kxe6, for example). The capture forces Black's reply and gains a tempo. Wait even one move and the e5 pawn can no longer be taken this way, and the check is gone with it.
2. Opening the square in front of the king (Black to move, rating 1500)
White has just pushed g2-g4. Black replies fxg3, capturing en passant. The point is what stays behind: the black pawn now sits on g3, two squares in front of White's king on g1, hitting both f2 and h2 and prying the king's cover open. Play anything else and the g4 pawn lives while this line-opening chance disappears. Knowing the rule is one thing; noticing that this is the moment is another.
3. Erasing one threat, creating another (White to move, rating 1898)
Here one en passant capture does several jobs. Black has just played f7-f5, attacking White's queen on e4. White could simply move the queen, but there is a better option: exf6 en passant erases the attacking f5 pawn itself. The queen is safe, and on top of that the pawn now on f6 attacks Black's bishop on g7. Black saves the bishop with Bxf6, and White collects the rook with Bxf8, winning the exchange (rook for bishop). Miss the en passant and play Bxf8 first, and instead of recapturing Black simply takes the queen with fxe4. One en passant move saved the queen and created the threat that won the exchange.
4. Opening the king, then collecting (White to move, rating 2151)
Black has just played g7-g5. White's f5 pawn takes with fxg6 en passant, planting a pawn two squares in front of Black's king on g8 and joining the bishop on f6 to press the king. With no real defense, Black tries Qf1+ to buy time, but White answers Rxf1, simply taking the queen. White comes out a queen ahead, and en passant was the first link in the chain.
5. Turning defense into attack (White to move, rating 2348)
A problem from the hardest band. Black has just played f7-f5, trying to seize the initiative. White's answer is exf6 en passant. The pawn lands on f6 and attacks g7, the square right in front of Black's king on g8. Instead of absorbing the attack, White creates a counter with the same single move. One possible reason for the high rating is that en passant is easy to overlook in a position this crowded, though the rating alone cannot show why players missed it.
Common Mistakes
- Forgetting the one-move window. If you do not capture on the very next move, the right disappears forever.
- Mixing up which color uses which rank. White must capture from the 5th rank, Black from the 4th. Other ranks never qualify.
- Confusing the destination square. The capturing pawn does not go to the opponent's starting square; it goes to the square the opponent's pawn would have occupied with a single-square move. If Black plays d7→d5, White captures with the pawn moving to d6, not d7.
Defense
If your opponent threatens en passant in a way that hurts your structure:
- Push the pawn one square instead of two, denying the right altogether.
- Verify that even after the en passant capture the resulting position is acceptable; sometimes the trade is fine.
- When the opponent already has a pawn anchored on the 5th rank, almost any adjacent two-square advance from your side is exposed to en passant. Plan accordingly.
Checklist
- Is your pawn on the 5th rank (White) or 4th rank (Black)?
- Did the opponent advance an adjacent-file pawn two squares on the immediately previous move?
- Is that pawn now directly beside your pawn?
- Have you evaluated the resulting position? (En passant captures, like all captures, must be checked for consequences.)
- Are you ready to act this move, before the right expires?
Related Tactics
- Promotion - the other special rule that belongs to pawns. En passant can decide whether a pawn heading for promotion gets past an enemy pawn on the next file.
- Underpromotion - promotion's tactical variant.
- Pin - if the pawn capturing en passant is itself pinned, the right exists in theory but cannot be exercised.
FAQ
Q. Is en passant compulsory? No. It is a right, not an obligation. There is no penalty for declining, and many positions favor declining. The decision must, however, be made on the immediately following move.
Q. Can I capture en passant two moves later if I forget on the first move? No. The right exists only on the move immediately after the two-square advance and is lost permanently if not exercised.
Q. Where does the captured pawn go? It is removed from the board entirely, exactly like any other captured piece.
Q. Can I capture en passant if the opposing pawn arrived next to mine via two single-square moves? No. The triggering move must be a two-square advance. A pawn that reached the square through two consecutive single-square moves cannot be taken by en passant.
Q. Can en passant interact with pins or discovered attacks? Yes. Capturing en passant can open a line that triggers a discovered attack, or your capturing pawn can itself be pinned, removing the option even though the geometric conditions are met. Check all line interactions on the move after a two-square advance.
References
- FIDE Laws of Chess, Articles 3.7.3.1 and 3.7.3.2 (en passant). https://handbook.fide.com/chapter/E012023
- Lichess, puzzle theme En passant (the source of this site's puzzle tags). https://lichess.org/training/themes
- Statistics produced by
scripts/analyze-theme-stats.mjs --theme enPassant; the run is recorded indocs/data/enPassant-stats.md. - The 52-tag comparison above is reproduced by
scripts/count-measured-bands.mjs.
Start training: En Passant Training
Related: Promotion · Underpromotion · All tactics