Chess lessons › Checkmate patterns
The smothered mate
A knight mates a king whose own pieces take away every square.
The idea
A knight mates a king whose own pieces take away every square.
- The king sits in the corner, boxed in by its own rook and pawns.
- The knight jumps in and gives check.
- Nothing can take the knight or block its check, so it is mate.
In a game: Look for a king in the corner boxed in by its own pieces, and a knight that can check it.
How the lesson begins
In a smothered mate a knight gives the last check, and the king cannot move because its own pieces fill every square around it. It almost always happens in a corner, with the king boxed in by its own rook and pawns.
Only a knight can do it, because a knight jumps. A check from any other piece would have to come along a line, and the king’s own pieces are in the way.
- 1. Nf7# The knight checks the king on h8. The rook on g8 and the pawns on g7 and h7 block every square.
Find the move
Find the smothered mate.
A hint
Look for a knight check.
Show the answer
41. Nf7#
Nf7# is mate. The king’s own pieces block every square it could go to.
In numbers
In the puzzle bank
474 puzzles in GreyChess’s bank practise it. Half of them are rated between 874 and 1,651.
The piece that makes the first move of the answer: knight 66%, queen 28%, rook 4%, bishop 1%, in puzzles from the Lichess puzzle database.