Mating is harder with more material

I play a lot of games against people that won't resign, no matter how much material you have.

Usually I have less then 1 minute on my clock in these situations, and I'm up a queen and 3 pawns and a knight and a bishop.

In these situations, I'd rather have just a queen and nothing else, because otherwise, the board is cluttered with stalemate possibilities and places for his king to hide.  He can hide behind pawns and my minor pieces, etc...

In these situations, would you try and mate with the help of all your pieces, or would you try and clear away the cluttered obstacles first, or how would you handle it?

I'll set up a scenario, lets say you have 30 seconds on your clock here...

Besides, nobleness and good sportsmanship dictate that Black should resign

In that position, and positions similar to that, for many people the method that requires the least amount of thinking, and thus is often also the fastest method, is as you describe... get your other pieces out of the way, promote one of your pawns to another queen, and then mate him just using your queens.

As you get stronger and play stronger opponents, you won't have to do this as often... strong players will have long ago resigned that position.  It's the weaker players that continue to play positions like that out.

Yes exactly, because they think they can get a stalemate.

Actually, I've come a bit close to stalemating in these types of positions  very often, forgetting that one of my bishops is controlling a key square.

So you'd shift your bishop and knight out of the way, and promote a pawn and then mate with 2 queens..

Interesting... there are a billion ways to handle these types of positions of course, but they are always just a bit irritating :)

I have these positions all the time.
Just cut his king off as close to the edge as possible with the queen.
Move any other pieces out of the way, far from the king.
Bring your king in.

The good thing about this is you can PREMOVE all of it without risk.
Now I premove it all and just type to the guy:

"ok its all premoved, Im gonna make a coffee, do you want one?"

At this point they will make a few moves to check how fast the responses come, then they lose heart and let the clock run out.

The victory is all the sweeter.

And I send them a trophy of a coffee

Hahaha... remember though, moving your bishop out of the way still means you're bishop controls that diagonal, so be careful of stalemating,..

I agree with the Monster, I'd move the Queen to e8, the Ba2 and just march that pawn up and make it real easy on myself since I'm low on time.

I play a guy at work who makes it his mission to always try to get a stalemate at the end and I always do the same thing unless I have 2 quick pieces like rook and queen or 2 rooks. I just prison his king to one side and march for a promotion and then end it.

One of the best ways to avoid this is to go for checkmate when you have overwhelming force (instead of taking to to capture everthing).

If you do reach a position like this for whatever reason, go for the fastest mate, and the more you practice the better your technique will be.

Some positions are hard to avoid stalemate, so just like a quick blunder check in the middlegame, make sure he has 1 square available.  The other time it's hard is when you're very very low on time.  Just scoot the queen back and have your hand bring your king close while your mind looks for some mate patterns :p

Here I'd play Qe4+ and mate is pretty fast.  I pick that move because it pushes him back one file.  Other good moves cut him off to keep him on that file.  Keep doing that and mate will happen quickly.  I once mated a guy with such coordination, that he called me a cheater and quit heh.  It's worth practicing if only for that

Yes, this is the question... mindless mating vs. skilled coordination.

Computers will find mate in 2 or 3 here, but with 30 seconds, can we afford to look for that?

If there's not enough time to think, then like I said do it nice and slow.... grab 2 queens and ladder mate him.  But when you have time going for accurate moves is good practice.

I had to edit it to add my reasoning, sorry.

I look for moves that push the king back or cut it off a file.  When the queen is a knight move away, that's usually when stalemate rears its ugly head.  In that case move the queen away and cut the king off.

Here's my try (even if a computer may do it faster ;)

did you see that monster ? see how waffllemaster did it without stalmating the opponent.  

says the person who started the stalemate thread :O

edit: kco beat me to it >:O

when you have time though... you should play like this..

pawns on the 2nd rank, move to the 3rd (after a long "think")
Eventually move all pawns to the 7th rank.
Leave his king just 1 square to move back and forth (to give him that straight jacket feel). If you want to play the guy again in another match, these sort of thing will make him emotional and angry, he'll play worse in the next game...
then mate him with the mate you had all along (without promoting anything)

They tend to start resigning when you do this to them. Help them get into the habbit.

The funniest thing about these guys, after fishing for stalemates like that, then they demand a rematch, hitting the rematch button like one of those lab rats where they hook up a button to a heroin drip feeder.. and then theyre outraged you decline, after just wasting 50 moves in a hopeless position to save 1/2 a point.

That is VERY dangerous, because once you check him around a lot, he could move into some corner and then stalemate is in the air...

Mindless checking is fun but hazardous...

you are a pu$$y

This.. coming from a guy who plays only correspondence chess and has 3 days to make a move, doesnt play blitz, hides his games in the archives and ignores many subtle stalemate patterns (including ones which occured in world championship games).

LOL!!! priceless

Anyone can make up all sorts of rubbish.
I played 6 of the past world champions!

If you had played those people you mentioned, you should probably know stalemate is not just a patzer thing, but has deep implications even in the middle game!
K + B +rook pawn  v K  in a huge number of cases is a draw for instance because of stalemate. This has implications even for openning theory.
Only a dim wit would think this issue can be reduced to falling into stalemates like they fall into checkmate in the movies with 1 move.

Anyway buddy , go hide under the porch along with your hidden games.

Title of this thread made me laugh