The Art of Checkmate

The Art of Checkmate

Checkmate is a game-ender. You can sacrifice potentially all your pieces except for example a Knight but deliver checkmate with that Knight. Or even a pawn. As such checkmates creates great dynamic opportunities in Chess middlegames and encourages attacking and dynamic players to try and expose the opponent's King as far as possible to help enable checkmate attacks.

This course examines the patterns and processes which enable mating opportunities on the chessboard.  There are various "art" forms covered in this course and artistic perspectives as well.

The basic art form of checkmates is to know the mating patterns that exist and can often be re-used or encourage deeper calculations. But other forms of checkmate often involving attracting the opponent's King out of his shelter and sometimes down the entire chess board creating an artistic effect in it's own right. Sometimes the opponent's king is simply attracted a little bit down the board and his reverse options to safety are prevented. Brining the opponent's King even just a little bit to our own resources creates an artistic effect of seeming effortless and reinforces the importance of King safety independent of the opponent potentially sacrificing many pieces. The King is a sensitive piece especially in the Opening and middlegame but can of course be freer in general to come out to play and be useful in endgames. Even in endgames though, dangers of being mated need to be factored in continually, and may be part of the necessary way of winning certain endgames.

The patterns and processes which enable mating opportunities on the chess board

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What you will learn

• Ability to leverage and amplify the important checkmating patterns for your own games
• Ability to construct mating nets - taking out key escape squares
• Ability to solve mate combination puzzles much better than before

Rating: 4.8

Level: All Levels

Duration: 20.5 hours

Instructor: Tryfon Gavriel