Rarity: Back rank checkmates, Scholar's mates, and especially smothered mates are excellent and each can be beautiful, but they are also quite common.Chess is for all, and the best checkmates prove that. Relatability: The best checkmates are accessible to all! Grandmasters will be struck by a unique and fresh pattern, but even beginning players can, with clear instruction, understand the checkmate and the moves leading to it.Quiet Moves: Most spectacular checkmates are delivered with forcing checks, but a quiet move that precedes the final checkmate can be remarkable, providing a breath of fresh air and a moment to enjoy the coming checkmate after a violent sequence.More beautiful are the cases where the defender has options available, but in all lines, there is a unique checkmate at the end. Multiple Variations: Some checkmates are quite directly forced, and the defender has no choice but to submit to one specific checkmate.Did the victor have to sacrifice the queen or perhaps all of the minor pieces to achieve checkmate? Incredible sacrifices doubtless make for beautiful checkmates. Sacrifices: What precedes the checkmate is often just as important as the final checkmating position.Who doesn't love to see a bishop and knight working together to deliver both the check and the checkmate? Diversity of Force: Using different types of pieces to deliver checkmate is often aesthetic.Checkmate with a lone pawn? Now that's beautiful! Checkmating your opponent when you have three extra queens is certainly a dominant checkmate, but it's not necessarily beautiful. Economy of Force: Generally, the fewer pieces used to deliver the checkmate, the better.That said, there are elements that we can identify that are often found in "beautiful checkmates." What makes a checkmate beautiful? Certainly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there are some mates that may be particularly delightful to you and less so to others. If you want, check it out now! Otherwise, scroll on for the full list here as well as thoughts on what makes a checkmate particularly beautiful. We've broken down our promised top 10 most beautiful checkmates in our video below. The coordination of the supporting and opposing forces can create thousands of checkmating combinations, some that happen daily and some that have yet to ever be played over the board. Even the mighty queen must, at a minimum, have support from one other piece from its side, or possibly some traitorous opposing pieces that block their monarch's escape squares. No single piece can ever deliver checkmate alone. By definition, checkmate involves coordination and teamwork between your pieces. It ends the game, providing a satisfying closure to a long struggle.Ĭheckmates can also be incredibly beautiful. Out of desperation, I started playing some nonsense openings and simply hope for the miracle.Checkmate is the essence of chess. However, already then I got crushed in blitz quite badly. There I have spent quite some time playing blitz against IM Leon Livaić (who was “only” a 2050 Candidate Master at a time). However, many years after the game above, I was playing in the Split open 2013 tournament. f3 Qh4# 1-0 your web browser and/or your host do not support iframes as required to display the chessboard alternatively your wordpress theme might suppress the html iframe tag from articles or excerptsĪfter this debacle, one would expect that I have learnt the lesson and that I would never fall for something similar. Only the player playing the White pieces can become a victim of the two move checkmate.Ĭonsidering that such a checkmate arises only after a terrible play on White’s part, this checkmate is also known as the Fool’s mate.Īn example game featuring the Fool’s mate is shown below. And we are going to start with the fastest of them all – The two move checkmate or the Fool’s mate. Therefore, fast checkmates are the main theme of this article. That question regards the least amounts of moves required to checkmate the adversary King right out of the opening. However, I would like to focus on answering one particular question that often fascinates the minds of beginners and novice players. For instance, when we are playing the game, we are searching for the best move we are willingly entering lengthy discussions about the comparative greatness of Fischer and Kasparov, etc. Heck, our obsession went so far that a separate body was created that publishes an annual book which documents all the unnecessary achievements of the humanity.Ĭhess players are not an exception. We are constantly trying to determine who is the biggest, the strongest, the most intelligent, the greatest ever, etc. We human tend to get obsessed with the superlatives in any field of human activity.
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