Every capture in chess, piece by piece
The 32 chess pieces by the square each starts on, joined whenever one took the other, across 1.8 million captures in 120,000 online games. The queens meet most: d1 and d8 are one capture in 37. Then the dark-squared bishops, White’s e-pawn and Black’s d-pawn, and the light-squared bishops. Red chords are where Black usually does the taking, like the Sicilian’s c-pawn taking on d4.
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Data: the Lichess open database, August 2026 (CC0): 120,000 rated games with both players rated 800 or more, ending normally. Each piece keeps the name of the square it started on wherever it goes; a promoted pawn keeps its pawn’s name. A chord counts captures either way round and is drawn for each pair making at least 0.05% of all captures (226 of 253 pairs). The top 8 are ringed in orange; percentages are shares of all captures. Played as puzzles in Daily Shade.