Do You See Checkmate?

1. It took me maybe 6 or 7 min.

2.Dont know for sure. 1600-1800 ?

3. the thing i look for first is checks.

4. hint. revisit your first observation. the mate in 3 lies within.

I finally solved it in about 5 minutes once I stopped looking for what the author had me looking for in the chapter titled queen sacrifices. There is no queen sacrifice, and I wasted 30 minutes looking for one. Arg! This puzzle was placed in the wrong chapter.

Regarding "3. The things you look for in a position to merit further time on the clock for calculating checkmate, or the threat of checkmate." - here's an example:

I see the castled enemy king exposed due to part of the pawn cover blown off (i.e, missing g-pawn), and I have two or more of the right kind of pieces aimed kingside.......I say to myself, there just has to be a checkmate pattern in there somewhere!  If I don't see mate immediately, I feel it's worth my time to burn a few minutes on the clock looking for checkmate, or at least a move to threaten checkmate, simply because the chances look to be in my favor.

Oh, I see what you mean.

You'd tell yourself you have 4 attackers to his 1 or 2 defenders.  That's what points to mate possibilities.

The systematic thing I missed was there's mate on e7, so look to remove the queen.  Honestly I just solved it by accident... I was looking at a4 or something then suddenly Rc8 popped in my head.

Yeah, queen sac is pretty misleading...

I'm glad you didn't put 'Queen Sacrifices' in the title, otherwise we'd all have spent 30 minutes looking for it.

I just skipped over all the writing in the post, and took about 30 seconds to find the mate :)

Because of the high number of friendly posts, I will present one more, and only one more puzzle from Fred Reinfeld's awesome work titled "1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate". 

If you like puzzle books, I highly recommend this one, and it came very highly recommended to me from one of our resident chess gurus - waffllemaster! It's a small book which fits real nice in the hands, with six easy to see puzzles per page.

5 seconds trololololol :)

While I was driving my daughter to her friend's house, I was still trying to find that, arg, queen sacrifice! I moved the queen in my head to every legal square on the board. Geez!

The idea with the second puzzle was to show that the book's puzzles vary in difficulty - from easy to pretty hard. It's a fun collection.

Second one is a beauty.

Heh, geez is right! If by 'queen,' it meant your sanity, the book may have a point.

1. I'm a very average chess player and it took me 30 seconds. Tops. Had to recheck it, though, 'cos I was thinking there had to be some trick I was missing.

2. Wouldn't know. I'm flat out beating the computer on easy.

3. Look at what I need for mate then work out if it's possible to remove any oppostion through sacs and then get that position.

I think this is the solution...:

1.Nc7+ Kf8 2. Qd8+ Bxd8 3. Re8#

If u see this mate w/ your rating your chess future is bright....

i like doing these once a knight...

1. Nc7+ Kf8 2. Qd8+ Bxd8 3. Re8#

rc8 (if qxr,then qe7 mate)
rc8 (if bxr ,then qxq mate)...rc8,rxr,rxr,bxr,qxq mate

ne7 dbl+ ,kh8,pxn dis+ mate--   nice work!