Chess and maths: what chess really brings to children

The link between chess and mathematics comes up constantly in conversations among parents and in staff rooms. It is often presented as self-evident: a child who plays chess would become better at arithmetic. The reality is more interesting and more nuanced. ChessCheckZine gathers what is really known on the subject: the mathematical notions the chessboard exercises, the schemes that bring the game into schools, the scientific studies with their results and limitations, and ready-to-use exercises.

Chess and maths

A term for using the game of chess to work on mathematical notions: locating by coordinates, the geometry of movement, counting, powers, logic and problem solving. It was also the theme chosen for the first year of the Class'Échecs school programme, in 2022.

Chess and maths: what truly connects the two

A chessboard is first and foremost a mathematical object. Its 64 squares form a grid of 8 rows and 8 columns, and each square has a name made of a letter (the column) and a number (the rank), exactly like a point on a coordinate plane. When a child writes “the knight goes to f3”, they are using coordinates without realising it.

The pieces, in turn, obey movement rules that are rules of geometry. The rook moves in straight horizontal and vertical lines, the bishop along diagonals, and so it stays on squares of the same colour for the whole game. The knight jumps in an “L” shape and changes square colour with every move. The king advances one square in any direction: to get from one square to another it needs as many moves as the larger of the two distances (in columns or ranks), which mathematicians call the Chebyshev distance.

Finally, playing a game requires reasoning. “If I take this pawn, then his queen takes my rook”: every move is a small hypothesis that has to be checked. This back-and-forth between hypothesis and verification lies at the heart of problem solving in mathematics. We detail these notions, cycle by cycle, on the page the maths notions a child works on the chessboard.

Do you need to be good at maths to play chess?

No. The rules of chess require no mathematical knowledge: it is enough to be able to count up to eight and recognise a diagonal. Many children who say they are “bad at maths” take to the game, precisely because it doesn't look like a worksheet. The game mainly calls on attention, memory of positions and the ability to anticipate.

The reverse is not true either: being strong at mathematics does not guarantee playing well. A good player's skill rests largely on recognising patterns built up over thousands of games. What drives progress is regular practice and structured learning: an adult who wants to support a child can, for example, improve through the Palais's online courses before passing it on in turn, at their own pace.

What the studies say about chess and maths results

The question has been studied seriously. Three pieces of work come up in every discussion, and they do not say quite the same thing.

• The Danish “Your Move” study (Michael Rosholm, Mai Bjørnskov Mikkelsen and Kamilla Gumede, PLOS ONE, 2017) followed 482 pupils from 34 classes in 5 schools in Aarhus, from Year 1 to Year 3. In the classes concerned, one of the four weekly maths lessons was replaced by a chess-based maths lesson, about thirty lessons in 2013. The authors estimate a gain of 0.10 to 0.18 standard deviations on maths tests, concentrated among pupils who said they were bored or did not feel well at school. The authors themselves present their work as a pilot study: the classes were not allocated at random.
• Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet's meta-analysis (Educational Research Review, 2016) pooled 24 studies. It finds a moderate average effect (g = 0.338), somewhat stronger in mathematics (0.382) than in reading (0.248), and clearer when teaching lasts a long time. But almost none of these studies compared pupils who played chess with a group doing another new activity, which makes it impossible to rule out a placebo effect.
• The English randomised trial funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (John Jerrim and colleagues at UCL) involved more than 4,000 pupils aged 9-10 in 100 schools, with 30 hours of chess lessons. A year later, in the national maths tests, no effect was measured.

A cautious conclusion: chess can help some pupils in mathematics, especially when the game is used to do mathematics, but it does not produce an automatic effect. The details of each study, with its figures and limitations, are on our page chess and school success: what the studies really say.

Chess at school in France

In France, the Ministry of National Education and the French Chess Federation (Fédération française des échecs, FFE) are linked by a framework agreement signed in 2007. Its preambles state that practising chess contributes to the development of personality “by encouraging attention, imagination, anticipation, judgement and self-confidence”. In 2022 the FFE launched the Class'Échecs programme, which provides primary school teachers with ready-made sessions from CP to CM2. According to two senior lecturers in education sciences, Fabien Groeninger (Université de Montpellier) and Yves Léal (Université de Toulouse), around 2,000 teachers took part in the first year, and more than 8,000 in 2025.

Le Palais des Échecs has published an analysis of chess against the decline of French education, which places these initiatives within the debate about pupils' standards. For the official texts, local schemes and how schools organise themselves, see chess at school in France.

The chessboard, a playground for mathematicians

Long before the studies in education sciences, mathematicians amused themselves with the chessboard. The legend of Sissa, who asks for one grain of rice on the first square, then double on each following square, has become a classic exercise on powers of 2: the total reaches 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains. Leonhard Euler studied the knight's tour that passes through each square exactly once, the eight queens problem was published in 1848, and Claude Shannon estimated in 1950 the number of possible games at around 10¹²⁰.

• Sissa's chessboardThe calculation of 2⁶⁴ − 1 explained step by step, with a square-by-square table.
• The great brain teasersEight queens, Euler's knight, the mutilated chessboard, pentominoes.
• The Shannon numberHow many chess games are possible, and why they cannot all be calculated.

How to use chess to help a child with maths

Whether for a parent or a teacher, a few simple principles emerge from the available work and school schemes:

1. Make explicit links. The clearest effects appear when the game is used to talk about mathematics: naming squares, counting moves, comparing values. Playing without ever making the bridge mostly produces… players.
2. Aim for duration. Sala and Gobet noted a clearer effect when teaching lasts a long time; they place the useful threshold at around 25 to 30 hours, roughly one session a week across a school year.
3. Start with mini-games. Before the full game, games with only a few pieces allow you to master one movement at a time. We describe several in mini-games and exercises for children.
4. Keep the enjoyment. The Danish study suggests that pupils who are bored at school are those who benefit most from an approach through play. Turning chess into a chore cancels out this advantage.

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Our method

ChessCheckZine is an independent editorial website. Every figure is linked to an identifiable source: a scientific article (authors, journal, year), an official page of the Ministry or of the Fédération française des échecs, or a verifiable mathematical reference. When a claim circulates without any serious source, we do not repeat it. The puzzles and exercises published have been checked move by move. More details on the about and method page.