Understand that you will be writing down move 1 for both white and black. This means that in a grid, like the one below, whites first move is next to the number one and black first move is also in the number 1 row. Now that we have started looking at chess notation lets see how a typical layout of chess notation appears.
A typical layout of a notated game will look like this:
Mike Tom White Black 1. e2 - e4 e7 - e5 2. f1 - c4 b8 - c6 3. d1 - h5 g8 - f6 4. h5 x f7 #
The "#" sign means checkmate (chess game over). Sometimes a "++" sign is used and means, "game over" also. A single "+" sign means that a check was made. The white queen has checkmated the black king in the above chess game. She has threatened to take the black king with check, and he is unable to escape from his position on the chessboard, therefore it is mate. The king cannot take the white queen for the king would then be in check by the white bishop.
In the short form of chess notation, the letters B, N, R, Q, and K are used before the chess notation to identify which chess piece is being moved. Each letter replaces the first move and hyphen in the chess notation. The bishop uses the letter B, the knight uses N, the rook uses R, the queen uses Q, and the king uses K. No capital letter in chess notation indicates a pawn is being moved. Moving the white knight from g1 to f3 in chess short form notation would read Nf3. When a capture takes place, the letter "x" is used to indicate the capture. For example, exd5 means that the pawn on e4 just took the piece or pawn on d5.