Grammar Correction: *if you know how it works. I have been a victim of this checkmate once, I forgot to type this into the paragraph above.
Have you ever been a victim of the Smothered Checkmate?
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No, I have never. The classical smothered mate pattern is constructed with a Q on the b3-g8 diagonal and a N coming to f7, like so:
90% of the time it is possible for Black to sacrifice the exchange on f7 and prevent checkmate.
As long as you've been playing chess you've never been smothered mated even once in your life?
If there were a bishop on a2 in the above diagram, no discovered double knight check would be necessary by the way. There are many different variations of this as can be seen in Fred Reinfeld's 1,001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate.
Never been a victim but never pulled it off either. I've spent several wasted moves trying to achieve this in a couple of games that I'd already won but none have panned out thus far.
I gave a funny one in a blitz game:
And black was rated 1857!
I had a smothered mate recently here on chess.com. My opponent was Computer3-Hard.
If you use tactics trainer frequently enough here, or the one on Chess Tempo, you will encounter this pattern with regularity and not miss it in your games.
A Smothered Checkmate is a checkmate when the king is in check and all of it's pieces are surrounding the king. It is triggered by a knight. The Venus Flytrap is also a famous Smothered Checkmate, created by Paul Murphy. Unfortunately, I cannot show you a diagram of how tye Venus Flytrap works because I am playing on Chess.com through an Apple iPad. Maybe you guys that are using computers can show the people how a Venus Flytrap works, if you how it works.