Help your mate mate December 30, 2006
Press Esc or click "Stop" on your browser to stop the music and "Refresh" to start it.

Puzzle 6

Helpmate in two moves

In a helpmate, both sides cooperate to help White mate Black. Also, Black moves first, so in the above position we are looking for a sequence of moves BWBW which ends with White mating Black.

John Nunn

Need some help, mate?

From our Christmas Puzzle of December 29, 2002

Chess is all about mate. You must admit that the ultimate goal of the game should receive its share of attention. Only problem is that mates never actually occur. Virtually never. Sometimes at an open or in a blitz game a grandmaster will actually deliver mate; and many have done so in their early pre-teen tournaments. But even when they mate it is usually a very mundane affair, with a protected queen slamming itself onto a square next to the enemy king, or one of those perennial backrank affairs. This is natural, because each side is trying to prevent the other from executing a brilliant checkmate.

All this is a real shame, because the game of chess contains a vast treasure-trove of extraordinarily beautiful mating motifs. There are thousands and thousands of checkmate positions which we normal human beings playing in regular chess tournaments will never see.

One reaction to this unfortunate situation was the chess problem, which appeared almost together with the advent of chess. Here an artificial situation is constructed where one side can deliver a very difficult (actually hard-to-see) mate in a specific number of moves. "Mate" problems have been around since the invention of chess. They can probably show us an additional few percent of the checkmates that exist with the 32 pieces of a chess set.

In 1860 one of the greatest composers of chess problems, Samuel Loyd, had an idea. He describes it in the book shown at the left. This is another of my great problem chess treasures, a Dover book from 1962, originally published by Whitehead and Miller in 1913. It was given to me by the generous Finn Mika Korhonen in 1987, when he saw how attached I had grown to it during a stay in his appartment in Helsinki.

Problem number 25 in the introduces the concept of a "help-mate". In his annotation Loyd is quoted as saying: "The most suggestive field for a new school of problems that has ever occurred to me, and one which would open up a new line of wonderfully intricate combinations, is shown in number 25, where the query is is merely: How could it possibly happen that White effected a mate in three moves? This it will be observed necessiates an active participation on the part of the Black forces, for both parties enter into a friendly alliance to effect the mate."

It was the first full-fledged genuine helpmate ever published, and it introduced a new era into chess problem composition which has resulted in tens of thousands of exceptionally beautiful and fascinating problems. After the direct mate the helpmate is the second most popular type of chess problem.

Rest of the column and some practise helpmates

Frederic Friedel