checkmate

Checkmate (often shortened to mate) is a game position in chess and other chess-like games in which a player's king is in check (threatened with capture) and there is no possible escape. Checkmating the opponent wins the game.

In chess, the king is never actually captured—the player loses as soon as their king is checkmated. In formal games, it is usually considered good etiquette to resign an inevitably lost game before being checkmated.[1][2]

If a player is not in check but has no legal move, then it is stalemate, and the game immediately ends in a draw. A checkmating move is recorded in algebraic notation using the hash symbol "#", for example: 34.Qg7#.

A checkmate may occur in as few as two moves on one side with all of the pieces still on the board (as in Fool's mate, in the opening phase of the game), in a middlegame position (as in the 1956 game called the Game of the Century between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fischer),[3] or after many moves with as few as three pieces in an endgame position.

The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Persian phrase "shāh māt" (شاه مات‎) which means "the King is helpless".[7] Persian "māt" applies to the king but in Sanskrit "māta", also pronounced "māt", applied to his kingdom "traversed, measured across, and meted out" thoroughly by his opponent; "māta" is the past participle of "mā" verbal root.[8] Others maintain that it means "the King is dead", as chess reached Europe via the Arab world, and Arabic māta (مَاتَ‎) means "died" or "is dead".[9][10] Moghadam traced the etymology of the word mate. It comes from a Persian verb mandan (ماندن‎), meaning "to remain", which is cognate with the Latin word maneō and the Greek menō (μένω, which means "I remain"). It means "remained" in the sense of "abandoned" and the formal translation is "surprised", in the military sense of "ambushed".[11] "Shāh" (شاه‎) is the Persian word for the monarch. Players would announce "Shāh" when the king was in check. "Māt" (مات‎) is a Persian adjective for "at a loss", "helpless", or "defeated". So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, helpless, defeated, or abandoned to his fate.[12]

In modern Persian, the word mate depicts a person who is frozen, open-mouthed, staring, confused and unresponsive. The words "stupefied" or "stunned" bear close correlation. So a possible alternative would be to interpret mate as "unable to respond". A king being mate (shah-mat) then means a king is unable to respond, which would correspond to there being no response that a player's king can make to their opponent's final move. This interpretation is much closer to the original intent of the game being not to kill a king but to leave him with no viable response other than surrender, which better matches the origin story detailed in the Shahnameh.

In modern parlance, the term checkmate is a metaphor for an irrefutable and strategic victory.[13]

There are four fundamental checkmates when one side has only their king and the other side has only the minimum material needed to force checkmate, i.e. (1) one queen, (2) one rook, (3) two bishops on opposite-colored squares, or (4) a bishop and a knight. The king must help in accomplishing all of these checkmates.[20] If the winning side has more material, checkmates are easier.

The checkmate with the queen is the most common, and easiest to achieve. It often occurs after a pawn has queened. A checkmate with the rook is also common, but a checkmate with two bishops or with a bishop and knight occurs infrequently. The two-bishop checkmate is fairly easy to accomplish, but the bishop and knight checkmate is difficult and requires precision.