![]() The two bishop checkmate is fairly easy to accomplish, but the bishop and knight checkmate is difficult and requires precision. A checkmate with the rook is also common, but a checkmate with the two bishops or with a bishop and knight only occur relatively infrequently. It often occurs after a pawn has queened. The checkmate with the queen is the most common, and easiest to achieve. If the superior side has more material, checkmates are easier. The king must help in accomplishing all of these checkmates. ![]() (1) one queen, (2) one rook, (3) two bishops on opposite-colored squares, or (4) a bishop and a knight. There are four fundamental checkmates when one side has only his king and the other side has only the minimum material needed to force checkmate, i.e. The same process can also be used to checkmate with two rooks, or with two queens.Ĭheckmate using a queen and rook. In the illustration, white checkmates by forcing the black king to the edge, one row at a time. The process is to put the two pieces on adjacent ranks or files and gradually force the king to the side of the board, where one piece keeps the king on the edge of the board while the other delivers checkmate. Two major pieces ( queens or rooks) can easily force checkmate on the edge of the board. 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. This style of play is now called annihilation or robado. As a result, the king could not be captured, and checkmate was the only decisive way of ending a game.īefore about 1600, the game could also be won by capturing all of the opponent's pieces, leaving just a bare king. Later the Persians added the additional rule that a king could not be moved into check or left in check. This was done to avoid the early and accidental end of a game. 700-800) introduced the idea of warning that the king was under attack (announcing check in modern terminology). 500-700) the king could be captured and this ended the game. In modern parlance, the term checkmate is a metaphor for an irrefutable and strategic victory. So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, helpless, defeated, or abandoned to his fate. "Māt" (مات) is a Persian adjective for "at a loss", "helpless", or "defeated". Players would announce "Shāh" when the king was in check. "Shāh" (شاه) is the Persian word for the monarch. It means "remained" in the sense of "abandoned" and the formal translation is "surprised", in the military sense of "ambushed". It comes from a Persian verb mandan (ماندن), meaning "to remain", which is cognate with the Latin word maneō and the Greek menō (μενω, which means "I remain"). Moghadam traced the etymology of the word mate. However, in the Pashto language (an Iranian language), the word māt (مات) still exists, meaning "destroyed, broken". ![]() Others maintain that it means "the King is dead", as chess reached Europe via the Islamic world, and Arabic māta (مَاتَ) means "died" or "is dead". The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Persian phrase "shāh māt" (شاه مات) which means, literally, "the King is helpless". ExamplesĪ checkmate may occur in as few as two moves 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 position. ![]() A checkmating move is recorded in algebraic notation using the hash symbol (#) - for example, 34.Qh8#. ![]() If a player is not in check but has no legal move, then it is stalemate, and the game immediately ends in a draw. In master and serious amateur play, most players resign an inevitably lost game before being checkmated, and it is considered bad etiquette to continue playing in a completely hopeless position. In chess the king is never actually captured - the game ends as soon as the king is checkmated. Checkmate (often shortened to mate) is a game position in chess (and in other board games of the chaturanga family) in which a player's king is in check (threatened with capture) and there is no way to remove the threat. ![]()
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