In chess can a king move next to a king?

Answer 1

No. The reason for this is that for let's say the White King to 'capture' the Black King the White King would have to move one square away from it the previous turn. Kings can only move 1 square at a time (except when castling).

This previous turn's position is not legal since if you were to move the White King one square away from the Black King, you would be moving your own King into check - and that is an illegal move in Chess (here Black King could 'capture' the White King on it's turn).

But the questions idea of capturing Kings is not quite right - a King can never be captured in chess by ANY piece. If you were to say move a Rook so that now aims directly at your opponent's King ('check'), your opponent has to immediately do one of three things: a) Move his King to an adjacent square that is no longer being attacked, b) take your attacking piece (if it can do so), or c) put one of it's own pieces in between to block the 'check' (again if it can do so).

If your opponent is unable to do any one of these 3 things then this is now 'check mate' and the game is over. So the King never acutally gets captured and removed from the board, unlike the other pieces.

The original answer had this to say:

>The real question though is can one King checkmate the other King? This is a

> trick move that can only happen if no other pieces of that color are on the

>board. Lets say that the black king is the only black piece on the board, but

> the there are 2 white knights ,1 White pawn , and 1white rook. The black king

> can checkmate the white king but the white king can not checkmate the black

> king.

This is simply not correct. The Black King cannot checkmate the White King in this case because it has nothing left to 'check' the White King with. To checkmate the opponent, their king must be in 'check', and as explained above a King cannnot do this by themselves. The best the person playing black can hope for is for a 'stalemate' position.

A stalemate is where the Black King is NOT in check, but it is black's turn and there are no legal moves (ie. all the other squares around it are attacked by White's pieces so the King can't move to safety, and black has no other pieces that can be moved on their turn). This position is a draw ('stalemate' is chess terminology for a draw). When playing white in this example, you have to be careful that you always leave a valid move for black to make when you are not giving check, otherwise you hard-fought efforts are waisted by getting a draw.

So as long as you avoid stalemate white will be easily able to checkmate black's defenseless King.

Answer 2

No. The king guards the squares so you can't.