Pin (chess) Pin (chess) In chess, a pin is a situation brought on by an attacking piece in which a defending piece cannot move without exposing a more valuable defending piece on its other side to capture by the attacking piece. Moving the attacking piece to bring on the pin is called pinning; the defending piece so restricted is described as pinned. Only pieces that can move an indefinite number of squares in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line (i.e. bishops, rooks, and queens) can pin. Kings, knights, and pawns cannot pin. Any piece can be pinned except the king, since the
Chess piece outset. Some small magnetic sets, designed to be compact and/or for travel, have pieces more like those used in shogi and xiangqi – each piece being a similar flat token, with a symbol printed on it to identify the piece type. On computers, chess pieces are often 2D symbols on a 2D board, although some programs have 3D graphics engines with more traditional designs of chess pieces. Unicode contains symbols for chess pieces in both white and black. The value assigned to a piece attempts to represent the potential strength of the piece in the game. As the game develops,