Checkmate Chess Puzzles

Background reading

Checkmate

Checkmate (often shortened to mate) is any game position in chess and other chess-like games in which a player's king is in check (threatened with capture) and there is no possible escape. Checkmating the opponent wins the game. In chess, shogi, and other related games, the king is never actually captured. The player loses as soon as their king is checkmated. In formal games, it is usually considered good etiquette to resign an inevitably lost game before being checkmated. If a player is not in check but has no legal moves, then it is stalemate, and the game immediately ends in a draw. A checkmating move is recorded in algebraic notation using the hash symbol "#", for example: 34.Qg3#.

Examples

A mate may occur in as few as two moves on one side with all of the pieces still on the board (as in fool's mate, in the opening phase of the game), in a middlegame position (as in the 1956 game called the Game of the Century between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fischer), or after many moves with as few as three pieces in an endgame.

Etymology

The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Persian phrase "shāh māt" (شاه مات), which means "the King is helpless". Persian "māt" applies to the king but in Sanskrit "māta", also pronounced "māt", applied to his kingdom "traversed, measured across, and meted out" thoroughly by his opponent; "māta" is the past participle of "mā" verbal root. Others maintain that it means "the King is dead", as chess reached Europe via the Arab world, and Arabic māta (مَاتَ) means "died" or "is dead". Moghadam traced the etymology of the word mate. It comes from a Persian verb mandan (ماندن), meaning "to remain", which is cognate with the Latin word maneō and the Greek menō (μένω, which means "I remain"). It means "remained" in the sense of "abandoned" and the formal translation is "surprised", in the military sense of "ambushed". "Shāh" (شاه) is the Persian word for the monarch. Players would announce "Shāh" when the king was in check. "Māt" (مات) is a Persian adjective for "at a loss", "helpless", or "defeated". So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, helpless, defeated, or abandoned to his fate. In modern Persian, the word mate depicts a frozen, open-mouthed, staring, confused, and unresponsive person—the words "stupefied" or "stunned" bear close resemblance. So a possible alternative would be to interpret mate as "unable to respond". A king being in mate (shah-mat) then means a king is unable to respond, which would correspond to there being no response that a player's king can make to the opponent's final move. This interpretation is much closer to the original intent of the game: not to kill a king but to leave him with no viable response other than surrender, which better matches the origin story detailed in the Shahnameh. In modern parlance, the term checkmate is a metaphor for an irrefutable and strategic victory.

History

In early Sanskrit chess (c. 500–700), the king could be captured and this ended the game. The Persians (c. 700–800) introduced the idea of warning that the king was under attack (announcing check in modern terminology). This was done to avoid the early and accidental end of a game. Later, the Persians added the additional rule that a king could not be moved into check or left in check. As a result, the king could not be captured, and mate was the only decisive way of ending a game. Before about 1600, the game could also be won by capturing all of the opponent's pieces, leaving just a bare king. This style of play is now called annihilation or robado. In Medieval times, players began to consider it nobler to win by checkmate, so annihilation became a half-win for a while, until it was abandoned.

Two major pieces

Two major pieces (queens or rooks) can easily force mate on the edge of the board using a technique known as the ladder mate. The process is to put the two pieces on adjacent ranks or files and force the king to the side of the board by using one piece to check the king and the other to cut it off from going up the board. In the illustration, White mates by forcing the Black king to the edge, one row at a time. The ladder mate can be used to mate with two rooks, two queens, or a rook and a queen.

Basic mates

There are four fundamental mates when one side has a bare king and the other side has only the minimum material needed to force mate, i.e. (1) one queen, (2) one rook, (3) two bishops on opposite-colored squares, or (4) a bishop and a knight. The king must help in accomplishing all of these mates. If the winning side has more material, mates are easier. The mate with the queen is the most common, and easiest to achieve. It often occurs when a pawn queens. A mate with the rook is also common, but a mate with two bishops or with a bishop and knight occurs infrequently. The two-bishop mate is fairly easy to accomplish, but the bishop and knight checkmate is difficult and requires precision.