ICCF numeric notation


ICCF numeric notation is the official chess game notation for all International Correspondence Chess Federation games. This is because in international correspondence chess the use of algebraic notation may cause confusion, since different languages have different names for the pieces.
In brief, each square of the chessboard has a two-digit designation. The first digit is the number of the, from left to right from White's point of view. The second digit is the from the edge near White to the other edge. Moves are designated by giving four digits – the first two are the code for the square of the piece that is moving and the last two are the code for its destination square.

Details

In numeric notation all the squares are numbered with a two-digit number. In this simple coordinate system the first digit describes the and the second one the. A move is defined by pairing two of these two-digit coordinates together: the move that would be written 1.e4 in algebraic notation would be written 1. 5254 in numeric notation. The pawn starts from square and moves to. Neither the type of the moving piece nor captures are specifically marked in numeric notation – all moves, except for pawn promotion, consist of only four digits.
In pawn promotion a fifth digit must be added: "1" for queen, "2" for rook, "3" for bishop and "4" for knight. For instance in the case of a pawn on f7 moving to f8 and promoting to a rook would be 67682. A four-digit notation where the ending rank is omitted can also be seen: 6762; however, this is confusing and against the standard.
For castling, the king start position and end position are recorded: for White, 5131 and 5171 ; for Black, 5838 and 5878.

History

The system was devised about 1803 by German professor J. W. D. Wildt of Göttingen. It was used 25 years later by Johann Koch, and is sometimes named after him. Ivan Savenkov supported its use in 1877 and it bears his name in Russia.