The Opera Mate: A Rare Brilliancy
You have likely heard of (or even memorized)Â the Opera Game, possibly the most famous chess game of all time, but you may not know the checkmate named after it. First, let's take a look at the game itself.
Now, a queen sacrifice to give an Opera mate is very rare, but this form of back rank checkmate does often lead to very nice tactical patterns. The Opera mate requires the king to be 'suffocated' by its own pawn and to be checkmated by the rook and bishop. Going back to the Opera Game, you can see that the king on e8 is checkmated by the rook on d8 which is defended by the bishop on g5. Also, a potential escape square is removed by the pawn on f7, making this an Opera mate.
Here is another (slightly different) example of an Opera mate.
Now, let's look at a position from a blitz game I played yesterday. Before scrolling down to see the solution, I would recommend trying to find the best moves in the following position yourself.
Congratulations if you found the correct answer! If not, here it is.
