Chess PGN Examples: Annotated Sample Games You Can Copy and Paste

Three ready-to-use PGN examples — a short trap, a classic game, and a fully tagged tournament game — to copy, study, or test in any chess tool.

Sometimes the fastest way to understand PGN, or to test whether a tool works before trusting it with your own games, is a working example you can copy directly. Here are three, from simplest to most complete, each explained.

Example 1: A bare movetext, no tags

The absolute minimum. No headers, just moves and a result. This is exactly what a hand-typed scoresheet looks like once you write it out:

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. b4 Bxb4 5. c3 Ba5 6. d4 exd4 7. O-O 1-0

This is the opening of the Evans Gambit. Any parser that accepts this is lenient enough to handle a real scoresheet — see our PGN format explainer for why the tags are not actually required.

Example 2: A short, famous trap with a comment

The Scholar’s Mate, with one inline comment:

[Event "Example"] [Site "?"] [Date "2026.01.01"] [Round "1"] [White "Player A"] [Black "Player B"] [Result "1-0"] 1. e4 e5 2. Qh5 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6{walking into the trap} 4. Qxf7# 1-0

Notice the checkmate symbol (#) after the final move, and the comment in curly braces sitting mid-line without breaking the move sequence. Both are standard and every real analysis tool handles them.

Example 3: A fully tagged tournament-style game

What a proper export from Chess.com or Lichess looks like:

[Event "Live Chess"] [Site "Chess.com"] [Date "2026.03.14"] [Round "-"] [White "exampleplayer1"] [Black "exampleplayer2"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "C50"] [WhiteElo "1450"] [BlackElo "1480"] [TimeControl "600"] [Termination "exampleplayer2 won by checkmate"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. c3 Nf6 5. d3 d6 6. O-O O-O 7. Re1 a6 8. Nbd2 Ba7 9. h3 h6 10. Nf1 Re8 0-1

The extra tags (ECO, WhiteElo, TimeControl, Termination) are not required by the spec but are exactly what a real export includes, and every analysis tool ignores the ones it does not use.

Multi-game PGN files

A single file can hold many games back to back — just repeat the tag block and movetext for each one. A game archive exported from Chess.com or Lichess is one file with hundreds of these blocks in a row, and most import tools let you browse them individually after loading.

Try it yourself

Copy any of the three examples above and paste it into Chesslume to see a full Stockfish report generated from it in seconds — a fast way to confirm a tool works before trusting it with a game you actually care about. For your own games, see how to import a PGN for analysis.