Qh1 because that's the weirdest way.
Aesthetics of chosen checkmate
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The question is a good one and if chess is an aesthetic and artistic game, it may eventually be lifted out of the doldrums it's been in for a while.
Still, can't see it happen when thugs are attracted to the game in droves.
With queen+King against king, my favorite one is :
I like the fact that the king are not in opposition.
I tend to favor : the less valuable piece
diagonals
many pieces
no redundancies (for exemple, two pieces controlling the same square)
Years later, I have a found that puzzle rush has slightly changed my aesthetic choices regarding which mate to deliver when there's a choice.
I will now tend to not play what seems like a common "puzzle-ish" thematic mating move if there's a less common alternative.
Due to quantum fluctuations, humans are great at just spotting and picking a move to deliver checkmate.
Mostly it boils down to how you where moving pieces the few moves before checkmate. In your diagram, if my queen was on the opposite side of the board and only recently got close to checkmate, I'd probably move the queen farther from the king to deliver checkmate.
If my queen was already at that position, but there was a series of exchanges of other pieces near the kings that liquidated the board, I'd probably be thinking of moving my queen next to my king to deliver checkmate.
Which mate do you prefer?
May 15, 2022
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#69
btickler wrote:
In a game where you are about to mate next move, and you have multiple choices...how do you pick one? ;)
Aesthetics? The first one you saw? The one that mates with greatest distance? The one that is closest?
For example:
The queen can mate on 4 different squares...how do you personally decide which one?
I like Qh1#. To me that’s the artist’s choice. It is better, however, when the queen must travel a long diagonal to get there. For instance:
I play Qa8# every time.
btickler wrote:
In a game where you are about to mate next move, and you have multiple choices...how do you pick one? ;)
Aesthetics? The first one you saw? The one that mates with greatest distance? The one that is closest?
For example:
The queen can mate on 4 different squares...how do you personally decide which one?
Qh3 and Qh2 are probably what I would play.
I would not play Qg5 at all, because if I mouse-slip, it could be stalemate.
On another site, I dragged a queen to the wrong square in a situation similar to this and ended up getting a stalemate. Basically, my queen arrived one square too short due to the mouse-slip.
I had to play with 2 bishops against queen in one over the board game once, it was after about 2.5 hours of play and we were both exhausted. I lost of course and was nowhere near as efficient as if a GM was playing it. I mention this as I think I learned a lot more from just playing it and studying it than from simulating with a computer. Since we are not GM level, I would recommend just leaving the computer out of the equation. There is nothing really to be gained from it. True learning will come from studying both sides of queen vs rook with a physical board. Okay, you will not find such accuracy but is the point of chess not to explore and experience and understand?
Thanks. I also think using a computer to practice that specific endgame technique at this moment must be cheating (or at least unethical).
It gets murky because a person will play against a computer just for general practice and find themselves playing opening they are involved in correspondence chess. This must happen all the time.
One of my current opponents is involved in a thematic computer tournament as well as a human thematic tournament in the same opening. How can he avoid this ethical dilema at this point? It is not possible.