

There are 8 different ways to checkmate in two moves. The longest chess game theoretically possible is 5,949 moves. There are 638 ways to put 5 queens on a chessboard so as to attack every square on a chess board. There are 1,296 rectangles on a chessboard. There are 204 squares on a chessboard (64 1×1 squares + 49 2×2 squares + 36 3×3 squares + 25 4×4 squares + 16 5×5 squares + 9 6×6 squares + 4 7×7 squares + 1 8×8 square). If you take a number and double it every time for every chess square (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 36, 64, 128, etc), by the time you get to the 64th square, the number will be 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. There are 26,534,728,821,064 ways to conduct a knight’s tour in which a knight is placed on an empty board, moves like a knight, and visits each square exactly once. There are 12 different ways to placing 8 queens on a chess board that are unique (excluding rotations and mirror images). There are 92 different ways to placing 8 queens on a chess board so that no two queens attack each other. The total number of chess positions possible is about 2×10 to the 46th power. Of these, 382,383,387 positions are unique. There are 85,375,278,064 total possible positions after 10 moves (10 ply) 5 moves for White and 5 moves for Black).

Of these, 69,284,509 positions are unique. There are 9,183,421,888 total positions after 9 moves (9 ply), 5 moves for White and 4 moves for Black. Of these, 12,150,635 positions are unique. There are 988,187,354 total positions after 8 moves (8 ply),4 moves for White and 4 moves for Black. Of these, there are 2,018,993 unique positions. There are 96,400,068 possible positions after 7 moves (7 ply), 4 moves for White and 3 moves for Black. Of these, there are 311,642 unique positions. There are 9,417,681 total positions after six moves (6 ply), 3 moves for White and 3 moves for Black. There are 822,518 possible positions after 5 moves (5 ply), three moves for White and two moves for Black, of which 53,516 positions are unique. There are 71,852 total positions after four moves (4 ply), two moves for White and two moves for Black), of which 9,825 positions are unique. Of the 5,362 positions, 1,862 are unique. There are 5,362 possible positions after three moves (3 ply), two moves for White and one move for Black). There are 400 possible moves for the first two moves in chess (2 ply), with White moving first (20 possible moves), then Black moving.

There are 20 possible moves for White’s first move (1 ply) in chess (16 pawn moves and 4 knight moves).
