How do I avoid stalemate?

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Avatar of bubba42414

I was playing a game where in the endgame, I was up a queen, a knight, and two pawns. And yet I somehow stalemated them! I want to learn how to avoid it because I was just super annoyed. (Game is shown here)

Avatar of NotThePainter

On move 58 you had cleared the pawns away. At this point you need to corral the king on the top of the board. Get your Knight out of there.

Get your Q to d7 and have the black king go back and forth from a8 and b8. Next move your king up to b6.

Then mate with the Queen.

There are videos on QK mates. You need to learn that (and the 2 rooks mate.)

Go to the Drills section here, find the checkmate ones, do them.

Avatar of Lime-is-a-crime

Until you go through a hundred drills. The rule to always avoid stalemates is to look at all the tiles that your pieces control, when your opponent can only make king moves.

You can see that your opponent's king has two move they can make, so you must make should that do not take control of those two tiles without freeing any other. You will get faster and faster at it the more you experience it, which will help you in other parts of the game.

Avatar of bigD521

Putting the King in check is always safe. (unless you blunder by checking with a piece that can be captured, which is not a stalemate but you lose the piece).

When you go to make a move that does not put the King in check, look very carefully at the squares the King can move to. If he does not have a place to move to, then you must make a different move that lets him move to at least one square.

If he does have a square/squares to move to, then before making your planned non checking move make sure that it does not take away the available square/squares.

When looking for available squares for the King, make sure you are including all of the squares controlled by all of your pieces. The more pieces you have, the harder it is to notice the danger which is why over promoting is dangerous.

When the King is trapped but not in check, but has a moveable piece, then you can neither block it (a pawn), or capture the piece.

Avatar of magipi
bubba42414 wrote:

I was playing a game where in the endgame, I was up a queen, a knight, and two pawns. And yet I somehow stalemated them! I want to learn how to avoid it because I was just super annoyed. (Game is shown here)

Do you know what stalemate is? I would guess not, based on your post. That's the first step.

The second step is to think of stalemate in every endgame when you're winning.