My first smothered mate

wow... 17... f6 has no other purpose other than allowing a smothered mate... nice. Well feel free to advise me in any way you wish... you won.

main lesson--take advantage of your opponent's mistakes. you look at the opening to give you a map to the game but you make mistakes throughout the game. your mission is to prey on your opponent's mistakes whenever they come and limit your mistakes. play according to the situation is the best advice i've ever received.

and no, it does not allow a smothered mate. he could have sacrificed the exchange instead. 20. Kh8?? allowed the smothered mate.

ya, red, it's true, I could have mated another way, but I was only focused on the smother.

There's a 2nd game there I got a few months later that uses a true smothered mate (although he could have gave up the exchange to stop it)

oh, and btw, you're quite fetching... that red hair and fair skin... you wouldn't stay on the market very long in a chess website to be sure!

Ya, you weren't the first to point that out. Maybe someday I could get a 3rd smother that is completely clear of 'controversy'

Ha, if you try to make it happen, it never will. It took me 10 years or so to get one, although back in the day yahoo.com/chess was the only place to play- and it was full of all kinds of horse hockey... and back in the really far back days (before my time) you could only play at a club.

Yahoo was never the only place to play. I played online chess before Yahoo had chess, and only played five or six games on Yahoo to assess the reasons for its popularity. It was pretty easy to determine that popularity revealed that a lot of people who nothing about chess were playing the game.

Computer geeks (like my brother) had ways of playing online in the late 1980s. Eventually, their coding developed into the precursor to ICC and FICS. Meanwhile, sites like Chess.net emerged in the late 1990s. Chessmaster also had online play for those who purchased their software. It was never any good, but it was vastly better than Yahoo.

One thing I've learned: having good opponents is a premium.

Hmmm ... this might be the most common of all smothered mate themes - does anyone know one that occurs equally often?

I like his mate, it looks cool.

I came close to a smothered mate in a school game but my opponent spoilt it by letting me checkmate on f7. (You know, when Kf8 allows Qf7# and Kh8 leads to the smothered mate with Qg8+)

They should make a rule "if your opponent has an opportunity to play a smothered mate you must allow him to do so"