1. Chess King has an app called Attack on the King I, which is nearly 20,000 mate-in-2’s sorted by the pieces you need to move in order to deliver the mate (e.g. King + Queen or Bishop + Knight, etc).
2. Chess Tempo, if you pay, will allow you to sort mates in their tactics and endgames problems by the number of moves (there are thousands of these).
(Note: I am not sure about the ability to sort tactics problems on this site by the number of moves, since I nearly exclusively only use the mobile version, where you can’t customize.)
If you are looking for a bigger challenge, you can try to solve composed mates-in-2, which are far challenging because the first move is never a check or capture, and hardly ever an attack on an enemy piece. These problems require you to conceive the checkmate schematically, then figure out the enemy responses. Indeed, Yusupov recommends these at the lowest level of his training series published by Quality Chess (Build, Boost, Evolution books, level 1). In my opinion, these composed mates-in-2’s are perhaps the “simplest” introduction to strategic thinking, though with a very obviously concrete decisive end to the analysis (so you can always see why the first move was correct... for instance, knight unintuitively moves further away from the action to cover two critical escape squares against the enemy king, etc.)
3. Convekta’s Mate Studies CD has nearly 1200 of these composed mates-in-2’s.
4. Laszlo Polgar’s 5334 book has over 3400 mates-in-2’s of which 1200 or so are typical mates in the middlegame (often you give a check, the opponent responds, then you deliver checkmate) while over 2200 of these are the more difficult composed mates in 2.
Some people don’t like the composed mates because they are “artificial” and the opponent in these examples often has no counterplay, so it becomes an academic exercise in trying to mate faster in a position already overwhelmingly decisive that many folks feel they can already win, even if less efficiently.
I personally like the compositions for some of the reasons I listed above such as: schematic thinking, space control, visualization, really calculating opponent’s responses, etc. Of course, I am not a strong player, but I have only just started dabbling in them. It would seem to me that being able to calculate two moves ahead is a critical skill for any chess player. Give me a year or so to work on these.
Hey Friends,
I recently chatted with a very strong local player, who suggested early on in your game, that it helps to work through Mate in 2 puzzles. If I understood him correctly, it will let you get a flurry of different tactical motifs in a relatively short period of time, and you'll know you've solved the puzzle correctly when you're done with it. I sure do like me tactics trainers, but I'm definitely open to trying this new approach!
So - here it is - what are your favorite tactics books that have a big number of Mate in 2 puzzles? Starting with 1 and graduating to 3 probably isn't a bad idea, either, but I want to make sure it's a good book with a hefty number of 2!
Thanks for all your input!