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Practice the Boden's Mate here!
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Practice the Boden's Mate here!

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Bernard2015
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Welcome once again! Now, we're going to have a look at another checkmate pattern. But first of all, I want to ask you a question. If you need to trade off a bishop or a knight, which piece would you choose? Now, of course, it depends on the situation: open space = better for bishop, close space = better for knight. But if I now ask you bishop pair or knight pair, most people would definitely say bishop pair. They can work together really good and can at most cover almost half of the chessboard! Today, I will prove to you that bishop pairs are really powerful as you watch those bishops deliver powerful checkmates.

The Boden's Mate. 

A little bit of background information here. Boden's Mate was first used famously by, well, Samuel Boden. He used it in his game with Schulder, where he won using a queen sacrifice. Let's look at his game with Schulder!

Now, as you can see, after White blundered by castling queenside, Black sacrificed his queen, to open the diagonals to the White king, and then checkmated him by using both his bishops.
The Boden's Mate is basically the 'criss-cross' mate, where one player uses both his bishops to checkmate the king. One bishop would be doing the checkmate blow while the other bishop, pointing in the other direction to the first bishop, would be used to limit the king's two squares. Like most checkmates, the opponent king must be limited by two of his own pieces to cut off more squares. The king must also be on the edge of the board (or corner) to be checkmated by the Boden's Mate. Now that you have learnt the Boden's Mate, it is time to test your checkmating skills! How fast can you solve the following puzzles?
Puzzle 1: Checkmate Black!
Puzzle 2: There is no forced checkmate here, but if Black is not careful enough, then it is checkmate alright. How can White checkmate Black if Black doesn't not play carefully? (Adapted from chess.com Boden's Mate lesson)
Puzzle 3 (Bonus Puzzle): This is unrelated to checkmate, but what if Black plays perfectly? Can you still place White in a definite winning position?

Puzzle 4: This puzzle is harder, you would need to coordinate all your minor pieces to checkmate black!

Puzzle 5: Checkmate Black! (This puzzle is adapted from chess.com Boden's Mate Lesson)

White's rooks are very powerful on open files, but how can White use the advantage with the bishop pair to checkmate Black? (Hint: Sacrifice a queen! (Actually you don't need to, but the solution has a queen sacrifice))

Well done for completing the puzzles! Those puzzles are not easy! Comment below on how you think the puzzles are! If not, try to use them in your game and have a great day!