Back Rank Mate! (Part 1)

#CaroKannDefense 

Today, I’m going to talk about a tactic and warning – back rank checkmates! As the saying goes, “it’s never too late to hang back rank mate”! On chess.com’s exercises and puzzles, many of them involve patterns of back rank mates. I’ve succumb to these many times when I was rated below 1000. Once you reach the intermediate stage, it’s less likely that you miss the obvious back rank mates, but nonetheless, it can still occur. In today’s game, I managed to win by checkmate, a back rank mate, from a completely losing position down 7 points of material! How did this happen? If you keep creating threats, especially mate in 1 type threats at the beginner-intermediate level, the opponent might eventually blunder a mistake!

In this game, I straight up blundered a full piece, a knight, on move 5 and was basically in a losing position for the entire match. And so, I opted to take a hyperaggressive approach, sacrificing material like the romantic period of chess was in full swing. At one point, I was down 11 points of material, but then, my opponent started to crack under the pressure. First, they blundered their knight, forgotting that their pawn was pinned. And then, they forgot that they needed their rook to guard the back rank! In my next video on Wednesday, I’ll talk about a recent game where this situation was reversed – I was completely winning, but was so focussed on my attack, and spooked by my opponent’s counterplay, I blunder and lose to a back rank mate myself!

I hope you found this game interesting, and thanks for watching!

Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/43817116929 

Originally published: https://adventuresofachessnoob.com/2022/04/25/back-rank-mate-part-1/