Mating patterns

A game on lichess.org, 2014. White to move. White has a rook on the seventh rank and a knight not far from the black king, and the king on g8 stands in the corner with almost nowhere to go. This combination, rook and knight against a king in the corner, turns up so often that the mate it produces has a name.

To find this mate you did not need to calculate many moves ahead. It was enough to recognise the picture: rook and knight, king in the corner. After that the moves find themselves. This chapter is an album of such pictures. Each section has one or two patterns and puzzles from real games where those patterns came together.

Why learn patterns

A strong player does not try every move in turn. They look at the position and recognise something familiar: this smells of a back-rank mate, and here a knight and queen are closing in on the king, as in a game they have seen before. Recognition tells you what to look for, and the calculation becomes short.

A mating pattern is an arrangement in which the mate rests on several pieces, each with its own job. One gives check, others cover the squares around the king, and some of the squares are blocked by the king's own pieces. If you know the pattern, you also know which pieces are missing from which squares before mate. And that means you can look for the move that puts them there.

You have already seen some patterns. The back-rank mate in chapter 5, the smothered mate in chapter 3, the two-rook ladder and mating a lone king with queen or rook in chapter 9, Légal's mate in chapter 10. Here we come back to the first two, and then go through the patterns that have names of their own. The names were invented long ago and are not always logical, but they help you remember the picture.

Notice how much of the work in these mates is done by the pieces of the side being mated. The pawns in front of a castled king, a rook beside it in the corner, its own knights and bishops around a king in the centre. They protect the king from some blows and lock it in against others. So in every pattern it pays to look first at the squares next to the king: which are occupied by its own pieces, which the opponent covers, and which are still free. Usually one or two are free, and the mate is the move that covers them all at once.

The back rank and luft

The back-rank mate is one of the most common mates in club games. The king stands behind three of its own pawns, an enemy rook or queen lands on its rank, and the king has nowhere to step: its own pawns in front, the line of attack to the sides. Only a piece of its own on the back rank protects against it, and that piece, as you saw in the chapters on deflection and overloading, can be lured away or traded off.

The defence against this mate has long been known. Push one of the pawns in front of the king in good time, while nothing is on fire, and the king gets a square to escape to. That square is called luft, from the German word for air. Most often luft is made with the rook's pawn: h3 for White, …h6 for Black. That move usually weakens the king less than the others.

The smothered mate

In chapter 3 you saw the smothered mate: a knight checks the king, and all the squares around the king are taken by its own pieces. A knight's check cannot be blocked, and if nothing can take the knight, it is mate. Most often games end like this in the corner, when the king has hidden behind its pawns and rook. But it happens in the centre too, right in the opening.

The classic smothered mate in the corner follows a recipe known five hundred years ago. The knight checks the king, driving it into the corner. Then the queen sacrifices itself on a square next to the king, so that the rook has to take it. The rook shuts in its own king, and the knight mates. You saw this recipe in a training position in chapter 3. Here it is in a real game, from start to finish.

Knight and rook

The knight and the rook complement each other well. The rook strikes along lines; the knight covers the squares the lines do not reach. Two patterns with this pair are especially common.

You saw the Arabian mate at the start of the chapter. The king is in the corner, the rook lands next to it on the same file or rank, and the knight defends the rook and covers the last free square. The name comes from old Arabic manuscripts on shatranj, the ancestor of chess, where this mate already appears.

Anastasia's mate works differently. The king stands on the edge of the board, next to one of its own pawns. The knight takes up a square from which it shuts off the king's way along the edge, and a rook or queen gives mate along the edge file. The name comes from a German novel of the early nineteenth century in which the heroine's game ends in this mate.

Compare the two patterns. In the Arabian mate the rook stands right next to the king and the knight defends it. In Anastasia's mate the rook strikes from a distance, while the knight stands to one side and covers the squares the king could use to slip away along the edge. In both, one of the king's squares is taken away by its own piece or by the edge of the board.

Bishops

Bishops strike along diagonals, and two bishops on neighbouring diagonals can cover everything the king has. Boden's mate is named after a game by the English player Samuel Boden in the mid-nineteenth century. The king has castled queenside, its own pieces are in front of it, and two enemy bishops strike along two diagonals that cross next to the king.

A bishop is good partnered with a heavy piece too. Greco's mate, named after the seventeenth-century Italian master Gioachino Greco, looks like this. The king is in the corner with a pawn in front of it on the g-file. An enemy bishop covers g1 or g8, the king's last free square, along a diagonal, and a rook or queen mates along the h-file. Often the h-file has to be opened with a sacrifice first.

Remember the back-rank puzzle at the start of the chapter: there the bishop on b7 on the long diagonal held g2, the white king's only luft. It is the same device as in Greco's mate. A bishop covers the king's free square from afar, and a heavy piece mates. If the opponent has luft, see whether a bishop can shut it.

The queen next to the king

A queen standing right next to the king covers almost all of its neighbouring squares at once. If nothing can take it, it is mate. So everything comes down to one thing: the queen needs support, a piece or pawn that defends it. You saw this in chapter 5, where the queen mated on g7 supported by the pawn on f6. And the Scholar's mate that chapter 10 warned you about works the same way: the queen strikes on f7, next to the king, defended by the bishop on c4.

Damiano's mate is named after Pedro Damiano, a Portuguese author of a chess book from the early sixteenth century. A white pawn stands on g6, the queen arrives on h7 next to the king on g8, and the pawn defends it. To get the queen to h7 in time, a rook is often sacrificed on h8: the king takes it and walks into a queen check along the h-file.

The last pattern in this chapter is the epaulette mate. The king stands between two of its own rooks, like between the epaulettes on the shoulders of a uniform. The enemy queen checks it from the front, along the file or at close range, and the king cannot step sideways: its own rooks are there. A position where castling never happened is a common case: the rooks on both sides of the king are still standing on the first rank.

The epaulette mate has a relative, the corridor mate. The king stands in a narrow passage: the edge of the board on one side, its own pieces on the other. An enemy rook or queen checks along the passage, and the king has nowhere to step. It differs from the back-rank mate only in that the passage can run along a file as well.

How to use patterns

A pattern helps if you see it in advance, while mate is still two or three moves away. For that it pays to look at the details of a pattern. A king in the corner behind untouched pawns: think of the back rank and the smothered mate. Your knight next to the enemy king: remember the Arabian mate and Anastasia's mate. A pawn on g6 or f6 near the enemy king: look for a way to bring the queen to a square next to it.

Then ask yourself: which pieces are missing from the picture? If one is missing, look for the move that brings it there, usually with check. If one of the opponent's own pieces spoils the pattern, remember the techniques of earlier chapters: deflection, decoy, removing the defender. That is how combinations grow out of patterns: the rook sacrifice on h8 in Damiano's mate or the queen sacrifice on g1 in the smothered mate are there to put the opponent's pieces where the pattern comes together.

And the same habit works in defence. When your king sits in the corner behind three pawns, think about luft. When your pieces crowd around the king on all sides, think about the smothered mate. When the rooks stand on both sides of the king and castling never happened, think about epaulettes. A king with a free and safe square survives most of the patterns in this chapter.

There are far more patterns than fit in one chapter, and you do not have to memorise them by name. What matters is that the picture recognises itself. The best way is to solve mate-in-one and mate-in-two puzzles. After a few hundred of them you will start seeing patterns where you used to see just an arrangement of pieces.

Start with the trainer from chapter 5, now at a level with many pieces on the board. In each position there is exactly one mate in one. Before you move, name the pattern to yourself: back rank, knight and rook, supported queen. If you cannot name it, at least find which squares around the king are blocked by its own pieces. Almost every mate starts from them.

What's next

In almost every pattern of this chapter there was a sacrifice before the mate: the queen on g1, the rook on h8, the rook on e1. Without it the pattern did not come together. A sacrifice for mate or for winning material, together with the chain of forcing moves that leads to it, is called a combination. How to find one and how to calculate it is the subject of the next chapter.