What Is Chess Scorekeeping?

In every one-on-one game, keeping track of the score is necessary. Without it, these games wouldn’t be able to have a winner and competitions wouldn’t make sense.

Scores also help determine the best players or teams in a sport or game as the team that scores the most points wins the matches and the player who scores the most points is normally awarded.

So, seeking to score the highest number of points is a key factor that led many athletes and players to become the best of their time.

Chess Scorekeeping

And When It Comes To Chess?

In chess, just like most sports, the player who wins the most matches is the champion of a tournament. However, the notion of score is not the same as with most sports. Scorekeeping in chess means taking note of the moves a player makes.

It’s true that score in chess can also be the number of points a player gets for each match played in a tournament. For that matter, in official competitions, chess players get one point per win and half a point per draw. Losing matches doesn’t award any points.

However, scorekeeping, in chess, does not mean keeping a record of the points a player scored in a competition, rather than the moves made by that player during each match.

And Why Should I Keep My Score?

As we know, chess is a sport that allows players to constantly improve their skills, design new strategies, playing styles, combinations of moves, openings, endgames, and much more.

A good way to develop skills is to keep a record of the moves you made on your last game, so you can see where things went wrong, which part of your game can be improved, etc.

Learning from your mistakes is probably the best lead you can follow in chess. Since even Grandmasters consider themselves students, due to the acknowledged impossibility of mastering all the aspects of chess, everyone can learn from their mistakes.

Scorekeeping can also be useful to return to the prior legal position after an illegal move has been made in a match. In official competitions, the game cannot be resumed before the pieces return to the last legal position.

Thirdly, you can keep the score to help figure out whose move it is. Surely, in official competitions involving more experienced players, this is a rare scenario, but it can happen, nonetheless.

Lastly, scorekeeping can be decisive when attempting to call the threefold repetition rule. This rule states that a draw can be called whenever all the pieces on the board are positioned in the same exact square three times in the same match.

This move, of course, is strategically used by the side that is facing imminent defeat in the attempt of scoring at least the half point of a draw.

So, if you’re on your way to becoming a great chess player, get used to keeping your score as that may help you dearly along the way.