Lesson 4
Basic checkmates
Winning pieces is not enough to win a game. Sooner or later you have to finish your opponent off with a checkmate. These are the patterns that do it, and they turn up again and again. Press Next to walk through each one.
Did you know? "Checkmate" is Persian. Shah mat means "the king is helpless", and "check" is just shah, the word for king. You will often hear that it means "the king is dead". That is a mistranslation that crept in when the phrase passed into Arabic.
The back-rank mate
This one happens a lot, especially in club games. A castled king hides behind three pawns, and one day those three pawns turn into a trap.
A habit that can save your king. When the position goes quiet and
nothing is being attacked, play h3 (or h6 if you are Black).
That little pawn move opens a hole for your king to escape through, so the back-rank mate
cannot catch you.
The ladder: two rooks
Two rooks can mate a lone king without any help at all. They take one rank away at a time, like climbing a ladder, and they always stay far away from the enemy king so they can never be captured.
King and queen against a lone king
One day you will promote a pawn and you will need this. The queen pushes the enemy king into a smaller and smaller box. Then your own king walks up to help. A queen can never checkmate on her own, so do not leave him at home.
Watch out for stalemate. With a queen against a lone king, keep the queen a knight's move away from the enemy king and always check that your opponent still has a legal move. See Special Rules for what happens when they do not.
King and rook against a lone king
Harder than the queen, and worth practicing with a friend. The rook cuts the board in half, and the king pushes the enemy king backwards using the opposition.
Scholar's Mate, and how to stop it
Somebody at club will try this on you. It works exactly once.
Smothered mate
This is the prettiest checkmate there is. The king is packed in by its own pieces with nowhere to go, and a single knight jumps in from an undefended square to finish it.
And here is the full version, known as Philidor's Legacy. White gives up the queen on purpose so that Black's own rook blocks the last escape square.
Epaulette mate
Having lots of pieces around your king is not the same as being safe. Here the king is stuck between its own two rooks, sitting on either side of him like shoulder pads. That is where the name comes from: epaulettes are the shoulder pads on a soldier's uniform.
Ready to try them yourself? The puzzles page has six checkmate-in-one positions and four checkmate-in-two positions to solve on a real board.