You don’t have to move your king when he is in check. However, you are obliged to get him out of check immediately. When your king is in check, your next move is always to get him out of it. You can move your king to do so, but you can also block the check with another piece, or capture the piece that is putting the king in check.
The king can take (or capture) every single one of an opponent’s pieces except for their king, despite its reputation as a weak piece. However, because of the rule that a king may not move into check, there are some limitations on how aggressive the king may be in pursuit of their captures.
A pawn cannot capture on the first move of the game because the opponent’s pieces are still in their positions, too far away to be captured. However, a pawn can definitely capture on its own first move, whether that happens at the beginning, middle, or end of the game.
You can checkmate while in check. But you must also get your king out of check with the checkmate because you are required to move out of check by the rules. That means you probably won’t be moving your king to do it and the circumstances under which this can happen are very rare.
There is no way that a pawn can attack on the very first move of the game because all the pieces, except that pawn itself, are in their starting positions. However, if white were to move any of their pawns 2 spaces on their first move then black’s response could result in a pawn attacking that pawn. So a pawn may attack on their first move as long as it’s not the very first move of the game.
Checkmate is a winning position in the game of chess. It is achieved by placing an opponent’s king in check and the opponent being unable to move their king out of check (or to remove the threat of check) on the next turn. A stalemate happens when a player cannot make any move that does not put their king into check. This is a draw, so neither player wins nor loses.
In the standard version of chess the answer is yes, a pawn can absolutely move forward without capturing another piece. This is true even when there is a piece on the board that could be captured by a pawn. It has no obligation in chess to capture any other piece.
You can certainly pass a pawn without taking it. There are no situations in which a chess piece is obliged to take a pawn before passing it except for the special “en passant” move.
For many players one of their earliest tactical objectives is to open up their position enough that they can move the king to safety through castling and it’s important to understand how this critical process in chess really works. You can only castle once during a game, and it’s the only time that the king can move more than 1 square at a time.
Yes, a pawn can move diagonally to promote but only if it is capturing a piece on the final rank. If it is not capturing an opponent’s piece, a pawn cannot move diagonally at all, not even to be promoted.
