Pillsbury's mate Chess Puzzles

By the numbers

pillsbury's mate puzzles: the numbers

There are 67,645 pillsbury's mate puzzles, solved 100,100,959 times in total. The median rating is 937.

How hard are they?

Often combined with

Checkmate · 67,644Endgame tactics · 37,990Mate in 2 · 35,640Middlegame tactics · 29,153Mate in 1 · 23,048Sacrifice · 12,642Kingside attack · 12,107Mate in 3 · 7,726Attraction · 4,625Discovered check · 4,112

Which openings produce them?

Sicilian Defence · 893French Defence · 535Italian Game · 428Scandinavian Defense · 378Caro–Kann Defence · 361Ruy Lopez · 317Scotch Game · 304

Counts computed from the full puzzle set.

How the solutions work · counted by a rules engine

What a typical pillsbury's mate solution looks like

Sample: 3,401 pillsbury's mate puzzles (5% of all 67,645).

34.7% need 1 solver move, 51.7% need 2 solver moves, 11.8% need 3 solver moves, 1.5% need 4 solver moves. Median rating: 840 for the shortest solutions, 1980 for the longest.

66.5% open with a rook move. The first move captures in 31.3% and gives check in 99.6%; 100% end in checkmate, 27.3% involve a sacrifice, 51.5% have White to move.

How many moves does the solver need?

Which piece plays the key move?

What does the solver win?

Material balance along the whole line, counting every capture by both sides (pawn 1, minor piece 3, rook 5, queen 9):

How much is left on the board?

How it is counted: every puzzle in the sample is replayed move by move with a chess rules engine. A sacrifice means a piece that is captured on the very next ply and was worth more than what it captured itself (pawn 1, minor piece 3, rook 5, queen 9). Sample of 3,401 puzzles. Percentages are shares of the sample.

Where it happens

Where the key move lands

Where the solver’s first move ends, drawn from their own side (rank 1 is their back rank). Busiest squares: e8 (18.2%), d8 (13.1%), f8 (7.4%), c8 (6.9%), h7 (5.8%).

Counted from the same 3,401-puzzle sample. Squares under 1% are left blank.