About this guide
Why this site exists, and how it was put together.
What this is
Chess Decoded is a self-contained reference covering two things: every piece on the board, in real depth — what it's for, exactly how it moves, where its name and movement rules came from, and the history behind it — and a curated library of strategies, from first-move openings through tactical motifs, positional planning, and core endgame techniques.
On the diagrams
Every diagram on this site is rendered live as inline SVG from a simple board model — nothing is a scraped or copied image. Piece movement diagrams are generated by an actual per-piece move calculator (see the pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, and king pages), and strategy diagrams are built by replaying the position's opening moves or a hand-placed instructional position, exactly the way you'd set up a physical board to study from a book.
On the champion photos
These are the one exception to "nothing is scraped": real photographs of every World and Women's World Champion, sourced individually from Wikimedia Commons. Every single one was checked by hand for an explicit public-domain or Creative Commons license before being used — never assumed free just because it showed up in a search — and each champion's page credits the photographer and links the exact license. Older champions (roughly pre-1930s) are public domain by age; the rest are Creative Commons–licensed press or personal photos, mostly from the Dutch National Archives' Anefo collection or individual Commons contributors.
On the famous games
The seven replayable games weren't transcribed from memory. Each move list was sourced from published historical records, then parsed move-by-move with an actual chess engine library before being converted into the board positions you can step through — the same "verify, don't assume" discipline used for the photo licenses and the tactics puzzles.
On video links
Rather than embedding or naming specific videos — which can go offline, get replaced, or simply be wrong — each piece and strategy page has a "Watch & Learn" link that opens a live YouTube search for that exact topic, so it always points at current, relevant results.
Scope
"Millions of strategies" isn't literally possible to catalog — so this guide instead covers 35 of the strategies, tactics, and techniques a serious player is most likely to actually encounter and benefit from studying, organized into five clear categories, each with genuine depth rather than a shallow, padded list.