How many named checkmates are there?

There is no fixed list. About twenty patterns are named often enough to be worth recognising, and the thirteen on this page are the ones for which this course holds enough real positions to show the pattern rather than describe it.

Do I need to memorise the names?

No. The name is a filing label; the shape is the thing that wins games. Learn to see the arrangement of pieces and the name will attach itself.

Which named mate should I learn first?

Anastasia's, the Arabian and Boden's. All three are two-piece patterns, all three come up at every level, and all three keep appearing inside tactics that are nominally about something else.

The named checkmates, one page each

About a dozen mating shapes recur often enough that players gave them names. Knowing the name is worth nothing. Knowing the shape on sight is worth a great deal, and the only way to get it is to see the shape a lot.

13 patterns
291 verified positions
Every line checked by the app’s own engine
Free, no account needed

Every page here does the same three things. It says which pieces make the pattern and where they have to stand. It lists the geometric facts that hold in every single position of that pattern in this course, with the count, because a claim about a mating pattern is either measurable or it is decoration. And it gives you real positions to solve, with the finished mate drawn out afterwards and a square-by-square account of why the king has nowhere to go.

Nothing on these pages was written from memory. The lines come from the same puzzle bank the course runs on, replayed through the rules engine the lessons use; a position is only called mate because the engine says it is.

Every pattern

Or drill the whole set at once Named Mates is a skill in the free trainer: 120 positions across five graded levels, four positions to a lesson, about two minutes at a time. Open the skill

What is not here

Two of the big ones have their own pages elsewhere on the site, because they are large enough to deserve them: the smothered mate and the back rank mate. Legal's mate is missing because the puzzle bank contains no positions tagged with it, and a page with no positions on it would be the definition page this set exists to improve on.

The rest of the library

Named mates as a single course page, or every motif in the course, one page each.