12/27/2023 0 Comments Do you say checkmate in chessOf course, I teach the basic checkmates described above but we focus more on getting a player’s entire army involved in winning the game. This leads them to miss mating opportunities with minor pieces and even the pawn.īecause of the above mentioned problem, I show more games that use minor pieces (and even the pawn) for delivering checkmate. Our novice player tends to (at first) think this to be the only if not easiest way to win the game. While it is important to teach these two methods to the beginner, it can create problems. This is followed by a King and Queen against lone King checkmate. In learning mating patterns, the positioning of key pieces to deliver checkmate, beginners start with the classic stair step method in which a pair of Rooks push the opposition King to the edge of the board. When the beginner’s idea fails, he or she tries another more grounded approach. Of course, we can’t blame the beginner because it takes experience to get past this way of thinking and that comes from playing chess and having one’s skewed ideas put to the test. There’s a lot of skewed thinking in beginner’s chess. After all, the more material they have to use against the opposition, the easier it will be to win. Rather than looking for mate, they see a Rook and decide capturing it will make is easier to eventually win the game. They also grab material like a starved animal goes after food. This is one of the reasons why they miss potential checkmates. Rather than slowing down before launching the big attack, they make moves as if they had only thirty seconds left on their chess clocks. As they improve, they learn to use multiple pieces that cover one another when attacking. They launch desperado attacks with a lone piece and lose that piece, only to try again. Beginners have trouble launching coordinated attacks early in their chess careers. By “time” I mean not taking enough of it to really examine the position at hand. With beginners, the primary problem seems to be time. Why do so many mates get missed by beginners, especially those that are fairly obvious? I’ll stand there looking at an obvious mate and mentally recoil in horror when the player who can deliver the winning blow fails to do so. Watching the students play at tournaments, I am amazed at how many checkmates are simply missed. I once heard a young player at a junior chess tournament say “I should get a point because I almost checkmated that guy.” Nice try kid but being close doesn’t cut it (even the arbiter laughed). If I had a dollar for every time I heard a chess player say, “I almost checkmated my opponent,” I’d be writing this from a beach house in Hawaii rather than while sitting in a ratty armchair with a pit bull chewing on my left shoe.
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