"FEN" is a short hand for Free Enemy kNight , written down next to OTB score sheet when your opponent blunders his knight in a game. It is optional to write FEN, but writing it gives you a FHC (Free Happy Chuckle) when reviewing your game in the future.
I am only a novice and when playing the problems I find the notations for analysis very confusing. Where can I find out their meaning?
FEN is a quicker way to write down any one chess position (a game uses pgn).FEN stands for Forsyth-Edwards Notation.
The general basics are as follows:
P = Pawn, N = Knight, B = Bishop, R = Rook, Q = Queen, K = King while capital letters are White's pieces and lower case are Black's (so above for Black is p, n, b, r, q, k). Position the board from White's perspective (a1 square on the bottom left) and begin notating from the top-left across like how one would read a book. Notate by writing what piece occupies the a8 square, then the b8 square etc. If the next square is unoccupied, then write the number of how many squares are until the next piece (or end of the rank). "/" indicates the next rank.
The FEN for the start of the game should look something like this:
rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR
Imagine I had Black's King on e5, White's King on e3, a White Knight on c3, and a Black Bishop on c6 (position I just created for an example), then the FEN should resemble:
8/8/2b5/4k3/8/2N1K3/8/8
The FEN string is a faster way to describe a single position in chess then detailing where every piece is in relation to others like a diagram shows.
If you want more quick information on this (now that you know what it is called) you could just look it up (Wikipedia, Google search engine etc.).
Sometimes people also write FEN as an 8-line Notation where each line has a corresponding rank, but a computer (and many people) simply use a "/" instead of a new line; this saves space by one long line (FEN string) versus eight lines.
what is FEN