Mate in 2: bishop to f3 (g4)
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The tactical motive
Mate in 2: the first move creates an unstoppable threat, the second delivers mate.
Difficulty 1802 ShuffleRating — for advanced tacticians.
Black to move — find the best continuation
How to recognize this tactic
Mate in two usually opens with a forcing move — a check, a capture or an unstoppable threat — that strips the king of squares or defenders, so the follow-up mate becomes unavoidable. Look for the first move that leaves the opponent only losing replies.
General method: before you move, list the forcing candidates — every check, every capture, every direct threat — and calculate those first. The solution to a tactic is almost always among them.
Position on the board
White: king h1, queen d1, rook a1 g1, bishop c1 e2, knight c3 f3, pawn a2 c2 b3 e3 h4.
Black: king g8, queen g3, rook a8 e8, bishop g4, knight c6 f6, pawn c5 h5 a7 b7 f7 g7.
13 white and 13 black pieces are on the board; the puzzle position arises after move 14.
The position in numbers
White are ahead by 2 points of material (36 against 34; pawn = 1, knight and bishop = 3, rook = 5, queen = 9) — the tactic has to convert or outweigh that.
The white king stands on h1, the black king on g8.
It is Black to move on move 14, with 52 legal replies to weigh — only the line that keeps the advantage solves the puzzle.
White keeps 5 pawns, Black 6. Files fully open (no pawns of either colour): d — natural highways for the rooks and queen. Half-open for Black: e.
White hold the bishop pair, an edge in open lines. The Black king has 3 empty squares to step to right now — the fewer they are, the closer a mating net.
Solution & explanation
Main line
14... Bxf3+ 15. Bxf3 Qh3#
Why it works
- Great move! bishop to f3 keeps the pressure (#1).
- Well found: queen to h3 (#).
- The line ends in a forced mate in 2.
- If instead Bxf3, then Qh3# and it is mate.
Move by move
- 14… Bxf3+ — bishop to f3 (capture) with check
- 15. Bxf3 — bishop to f3 (capture)
- Qh3# — queen to h3 and it is checkmate
Types in this puzzle
Corner mate
Driven into the corner, the king runs out of squares.
The corner mate catches a king driven into the corner, where it has only three neighboring squares — all of them taken away or blocked. The corner is the worst home for a king, because the attacker needs to control the fewest squares there. Herd the king toward the corner with checks and never let it slip back toward the center. Cut off the escape routes before the final check, and the mate practically assembles itself.
Mate in 2
A forced checkmate in two moves.
Mate in two: your move, any reply, then the mating blow. Start with the most forcing first moves — checks and sacrifices that shrink the opponent's options to almost nothing. Against every single reply you must have a mate ready, so check them all without exception. The common failure is analyzing the pretty defense and forgetting the boring one.
Counter-strike
Don't defend — answer the threat with a bigger one.
The counter-strike: instead of defending against the threat, you answer with a bigger threat of your own. While your opponent grabs a pawn, you deliver mate — the arithmetic favors you. Look for a counter when direct defenses fail: do you have a check, an attack on the queen, a mating threat? The beginner's error is meeting every threat with a reflexive defense without checking the counterattacking resources first.
Provenance
Derived from the Lichess puzzle database (CC0).
Pack 013
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