Mastering Chess: The textbook Way
Submitted by
materialkiller on Thu, 05/08/2008 at 11:40pm.
Lesson 1: Simple Mates (A outline of what you should learn.)
All mates require a combination of more than 1 piece. But two piece combinations that don't mate are King and Bishop or King and Knight.
Mate the King with two Rooks.
Simple Exercise - Too understand what a cuttoff is and the art of driving the enemy king "off the plank".
Mate the King with Queen and King.
The art of geometry. The Queen is a powerful piece she alone can drive the king to the plank (edge of the board). (I call it the rule of the rectangle - does anyone know another name for it?)
Mate the King with Rook (cutoff) and King (wall).
Combining the Cutoff with the power of the "wall of Opposition" (I like this termenology since Opposition will be a main topic for lesson two King and Pawn endgames.)
Mate the King with two bishops (the laser fence) and King (wall)
When two bishops occupy adjacent diagonals form a powerful fence with the help of the king and drive the king to plank. Once the King reaches the plank White must drive him to the corner of it from here The bishops can findly push him in checkmate!
Mate the King with bishop, Knight, and King. (The hardest since you can't mate king with two knights unless your opponent has a pawn but not all pawns are created equal some lines are drawn.)
Since I call the two bishop the laser fence, I call this the detour. My explanation is that the knight wants to cover opposite color squares than the bishop leaving the maximun squares control in a straight line is 8. 4 vertical and 4 horizontal. Understanding this relationship helps drives the king to the plank. Though most of the time I use the small the detour of only 3 squares to help drive the king to plank. A trick for black is to head to the "bad corner" (opposite color of the bishop since he can only be mated in the "good corner".
Alot of beginner books cover the mating process from the bad corner to the good corner. In my puzzle you can click on soultion to see my thought process, I would like suggestion on how to describe the process more clearly.