How many knight + bishop endgame mates have actually happened in your games ?

I used to require this checkmate as part of my scholastic chess awards. I replaced it with the Lucena and Philidor positions (rook endings), as these have practical value.

Learning bishop and knight can teach coordination, and may have some merit in that respect. I've seen it in less than 20 games in my database of 57,000. Some of those were artificial--created by underpromotion.

I have never had it happen in one of my games and have only seen it once during a tournament I ran and that one ended in a draw as the stronger player didn't know how to checkmate.

A while back, I started building a database of basic endgame positions from a large database and found quite a few games that came down to that material, though I don't recall right off how many were there; as a percentage of how many games there were in the databse it was pretty small. I want to say I found at least 100 that resulted in a position that could be won (where the next move or two didn't lose a piece or end in stalemate). I don't have that database near me right now so I can check for anything more specific or verify my recollection.

So, that endgame is pretty rare in practice, but suprisingly to me, there were more of that type of position than 2B+K vs K endgames, at least in the database I was using.

I've played approximately 500 games on chess.com, and it SHOULD have happened exactly once.  My oppponet hung his rook which would have left me with the ending, but I missed it.  I'm 100% confident I could NOT have forced mate.  After all, I'm the guy who misses hanging rooks.

A back-of-the enveloppe calculation tells me I've played around 5000 games in my life.

That endgame occured only once in a natural way (when I was 10 and around 1300, an older player who was totally crushing me let me take his queen so that he could show me that this endgame is winning). I won it, though not without difficulties.

EDIT : note that I very rarely play "do or die" attacks, so I get into endgames more often than the average player at my club. On the other hand, endgames are more frequent in higher-rated players games. So I am probably in the average frequency.

I have never had the opportunity to try (and I don't know it but I could find out for a correspondence game).

Once ever

as I had only a few seconds left, I failed to achieve it.

I'm afraid someone can try now on me in a 960 game

That game ended in draw. But in my current game i'm the one with knight+bishop.

Life is too short to study mating with King-Knight-Bishop against bare King, the ending almost never comes up and is too hard to figure out over the board unless you are some kind of Braniac. Just hope the opponent resigns before you muddle around and hit 50 moves.   

Lol.

If GMs make their opponents play it, with some success it seems, who would resign ?

It really is not that hard...

The closest I've ever gotten was K+B+B+N+N, which my opponent and I agreed to play out just for the heck of it.

I agree, its not exactly something you want to see come up in short time but its by no means a draw definitely not a reason to resign.  Its the same pattern just repeated, alot...

Well, B+N is not very hard, but it's also very rare.

I would say learning a few key positions (won and drawn) of R+B vs R is more important ; even if it's much harder, it's a lot more likely to happen.