Mate with two bishops... or not

I saw this between two ten-year-olds at my club the other week. In the position below, black was about to promote the pawn to a queen, when his opponent interrupted with something like "Haha, what a wimp, you don't know how to checkmate with two bishops!". Indignantly, he puts the queen back, and promotes to a bishop instead. A couple of moves later, it dawned on him what he had done. His opponent was just smirking.

Black probably learned a valuable lesson: don't play for ego or to prove something, play to win!

If the promotion were on a light square, promotion to Bishop would be fine (Queen would still be easier).  Here, however, Black can promote to anything BUT a Bishop (even a Knight would work) and win, but again, I'd promote to a Queen.  The only times I've ever promoted to something other than Queen are when the Queen stalemates, or occasionally if promoting to a Knight works better (typically because it's check and a Queen wouldn't be, and you don't have the time to promote to Queen as your opponent say, gets a perpetual), I'll of course take that route.  I did actually promote one time against a player who never resigned a single game, and was rated well over 1800, not a beginner, and so I wanted to inflict lengthened pain in her, and so I promoted my 2 pawns to Bishops (they were g- and h-pawns, so they were on opposite colors, and I didn't want to do B and N with under 10 minutes left on the clock) and mated her.

Hopefully. Although I suppose you've also got to give white some form of credit for the quick imaginative thinking(!)

Talking of learning the hard way, I've also seen this: 1. e4 e5 2. Qh5 ["Oh look, there's a fly landed on your king!"] Ke7 [touch-move] 3. Qxe5#

I've seen this situation before. Luckily the winning player had extra pawns.

lol