Checkmate is the object of the game!
Finding checkmate sequence / Successful attack completion
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That's what I see so often in the games of weaker players (no offense) - they can't checkmate! so they slog into some endgame when it should have been over 20 moves ago.
Checkmate is the object of the game!
Checkmate is the object of the game!
I don't know what to tell you.
You know there are study materials for learning checkmate patterns.
I studied a Fred Reinfeld book ages ago and very few mates have escaped me since then.
How do your answers help me with my problem?
I don't know if this will help or not but it helped me. When I first started studying chess I had issues with finding mates. I ended up buying a checkmate book that had hundreds of mate in 1,2 ,3 ,4, 5 puzzles and then later an app of the same sort of thing. Seeing mates now is one area that I'm fairly strong at. Anyway what I started doing was visualising a square surrounding the enemy king which helped me to calculate possible escape squares. I did that when I did the checkmate puzzles and I still do it to this day during games.
Among my weaknesses (which I am aware of), the most irritating and the most important for me, at this point, is "checkmate blindness", whether because of time pressure or because of any other reason.
Most of the time I am able to develop a pretty tough attack that forces my opponent to defend and not letting him to seize the initiative.
The problem is that I can't see, too often (!), a forced checkmate sequence and sometimes even mate in 1. Despite the fact that I am familiar with all checkmate patterns and easily checkmating a lonely king with knight+bishop etc.
My question is what is a good way to improve those checkmating skills when the board is not empty and the checkmate is not obvious? Solving checkmate puzzles doesn't help me too much because I know that the checkmate is unavoidable and I am able to find it.
For example, this is a game I played yesterday (white). Eventually, I won this game but I did not find the checkmate sequence 5 times!