I finally learned to perform a two bishop checkmate!

I always wrote off the two bishop checkmate as something I simply wasn't smart enough to do. I understood vaguely, abstractly, how the concept worked, but when I tried to implement it against the engine, I was hopelessly lost.

Recently I watched GM Hovhannes Gabuzyan's course 'The Power of the Bishop Pair' in which he narrates a series of GM games and illustrates how bishops can be used not only to attack and to capture but also to restrict and to corral.

I never really understood this concept for a long time. I always tended to think of bishops first and foremost as projectiles, as the chess equivalent of an Exocet missile. They can certainly be that - but they can also be used to create no-go zones where an opponent's pieces cannot go. 

Various people have over the past year tried to explain this concept to me and it never really sunk in. The idea of a piece 'controlling' squares just sounded odd; it conjured up images of an annoying manager nitpicking at people for minor things. 

Then during GM Gabuzyan's course he used a very simple diagram showing two bishops in the middle of an empty board with arrows showing the X-shaped paths where enemy pieces could not go without being captured. It simplified this concept for me and it started making sense. I finally understood how if a piece...let's say a king...were trapped in the triangle formed by the two bishops' line of fire, there would be no way out. 

I tried again at the two-bishop drill provided by chess.com...and after a few clumsy tries, I finally managed to checkmate! I don't know why it made such a difference how the idea was presented, but a big thank you to GM Hovhannes Gabuzyan.