Ranking Checkmates
Greetings! Welcome to my first blog post of 2023! Today I will be doing something I have been thinking of doing for a little bit. I will be ranking checkmates on a tier list by Rarity, Uniqueness, and Difficulty. They vary from the Scholar's Checkmate to the near-impossible En Passant Checkmate. So let's get started!
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First I would like to give a shout-out to the club BlogChamps. It is a very active club where you can share your blogs and get supportive feedback from fellow bloggers. There are also blogging competitions, where the winner gets to have 2 Top Bloggers tell Chess.com they should be a Top Blogger. I would highly recommend joining this club, as it is a very fun and useful club to join. Now let's get to this blog!
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Scholars Mate:
Starting off this Tier list, we have the Scholars Mate. Also known as the 4 Move Checkmate, Beginners fall for this most often.
While good for beginners, the Scholars Mate is useless against higher-rated opponents, and a simple 4 move game just isn't very interesting to watch. For these reasons, I am putting this in the D Category. Not the worst, but not very good either.
Smothered Mate:
The Smothered Mate is when you checkmate your opponent with just your knight. When your opponents have their king trapped by their pieces, the Smothered Mate can occur.
The Smothered Mate can be used in creative ways, and it's not one of the most common checkmates. For this reason, this is going into the A tier.
Fools Mate:
Does this really need an introduction? The Fools Mate is the shortest checkmate there is. Only 2 moves, it will take a true beginner to actually fall for it on accident. It is very rare, even in practice, or for beginners.
This is such a stupid checkmate, so stupid that it is silly. So I am putting it in the B Tier.
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After these 3 checkmates, this is what the list is so far:
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Arabian Mate:
The Arabian Mate is when a King is trapped in a corner and the Knight and Rook checkmate it while it's there. It can look something like this:
The Arabian Mate is a decent checkmate, with the Knight and Rook pinning it to the edge. This one is going into C Tier.
Bishop, Knight, and King Mate:
This may seem simple, but many people don't know how to do this checkmate. It's where the king is, you guessed it, The corner. The Bishop and Knight pin the surrounding areas and the King keeps the diagonal safe. It looks like this:
This checkmate is one of the hardest, with even some of the best struggling to pull this off in games. That's why this is going into A Tier.
En Passant Mate:
The best checkmate ever. There is just no other way of saying it. This is so rare, only a few documented cases of it has happened. The most famous case happened in 1928 in Gunnar Gundersen vs. A H Faul.
Being such an amazing and rare checkmate, it's only fitting that this belongs in S Tier.
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We are over halfway done! This is how the list looks at the moment:
(Yes, I know the picture of the Bishop and Knight mate doesn't actually show checkmate, but I forgot to change it and it was too late to fix it when I made this blog. )
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To speed up these last 4 checkmates, I will review them in pairs:
Back Rank and Rook Checkmates
These 2 checkmates are very similar. They both involve the King getting trapped and checkmated by the Rook. The Back Rank Mate looks like this:
The Back Rank mate is not very hard to fall for but definitely makes you laugh when a titled player falls for it. C is the Tier where this belongs.
The Rook Mate is very similar to this, but with the king blocking the other king instead of their own pieces. It is performed like this:
It has basically the same components as the Back Rank Mate, but this is harder to learn. That's why it goes in the B Category.
Boden and Ladder Checkmates:
The Boden and Ladder Checkmates use two of the same piece to execute them. Boden uses 2 Bishops, and Ladder uses 2 Rooks. The Ladder Mate uses the rooks to walk the King down the board, like this:
The Ladder Mate is a simple, yet effective checkmate. But it's not very hard to execute. That's why this goes into Tier C.
The Boden Mate is a little more complicated, as Bishops don't have the same range of movement as Rooks do. One Bishop is used to protect the light-colored squares, while the other Bishop covers the dark squares like this:
A little harder to do than the Ladder Mate, this is ending up in the B Tier.
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That was a fun Tier list to make! The final product looks like this:
Thank you for sticking out to the end of this blog, see yall next post!
