What Is En Passant?

En passant, French for "in passing," is a special pawn capture. Normally a pawn can only capture a piece that's diagonally in front of it. En passant is the one exception: if an enemy pawn advances two squares from its starting position and lands directly beside your pawn, you may capture it as though it had only moved one square, taking it on the square it passed over rather than the square it landed on. It's a legal move under every rule set, including FIDE tournament rules and every major online platform, not a house rule or a myth some players like to claim it is.

The Three Conditions

All of the following must be true for en passant to be available:

The capturing pawn must be on its fifth rank (the fourth rank if you're Black), the row a pawn reaches after three of its own forward moves.

The enemy pawn must have just advanced two squares on its very first move, landing directly beside your pawn on an adjacent file. If it reached that square in two separate one-square moves instead, en passant is not available.

You must capture immediately. The capture is only legal on the very next move after the two-square advance. Play anything else first and the opportunity is gone permanently for that pawn, with no way to save it for later.

Why the Rule Exists

Pawns originally could only ever move one square at a time. The two-square first move was added later to speed the game up, but it created an unintended side effect: a pawn could now sneak past an enemy pawn that would have been able to capture it under the old one-square-only rules, making it far too easy to create an uncontested passed pawn. En passant closes that loophole, preserving the capturing chance the defending pawn would have had while still keeping the faster two-square advance.

A Brief History

The two-square pawn move and the en passant rule that came with it both trace back to late medieval Europe, with pawns able to move two squares as early as around 1200 A.D. in some regions. The exact form of the en passant rule varied by region for centuries afterward, and it didn't become fully standardized worldwide until the modern rules solidified in the mid-1800s.

Not Just a Beginner's Trick

It's easy to dismiss en passant as a quirky rule that only matters in casual games, but it shows up at the very highest level too. Magnus Carlsen used it in a decisive game against Sergey Karjakin at the 2018 Sinquefield Cup, proof that the rule can matter even in elite competition, not just beginner mix-ups. It's also worth knowing that en passant is the only move in chess that can deliver a double check without the moving piece itself giving one of the checks, since removing the captured pawn can uncover an attack from a piece behind it.

Try It Yourself

Here's a position where White's pawn on e5 has just watched Black play d7-d5. Load it into the analyzer and try the en passant capture yourself:

Analyze an en passant position →

(The answer: exd6 — White's e5 pawn captures the black d5 pawn "in passing," landing on d6 as though the black pawn had only advanced one square.)

Or set up any position from your own games on the chess analyzer to check whether an en passant capture was available and you missed it.

En passant is one of several special pawn rules worth knowing well — see our guide to pawn promotion for what happens when a pawn reaches the far end of the board instead.