The Art of Checkmate
What you'll learn
- Ability to leverage and amplify the important checkmating patterns for your own games
- Ability to construct mating nets - taking out key escape squares
- Ability to solve mate combination puzzles much better than before
- Ability to improve chess rating through ruthless checkmate combinations
- Ability to recognise key weakness of last move, support squares, liberational effects when calculating variations
- Ability to think of the key mating patterns concisely without necessarily worrying too much about remembering names
- Ability to have support remembering mating pattern names which does have advantage of looking up examples more easily
- Ability to have funny ways to remember the mate pattern names - and also "Name on Tin" methods especially
- Ability to amplify like never before mating patterns which may be heavily disguised in the position
- Ability to appreciate the great beauty of mating combinations played by players of all levels and times in chess history
- Ablity to make use of "amplification" as a key chess skill in general - on the same power level as calculation, evaluation, visualisation
- Ability to get a very low tolerance for sources of hassle or defensive resource - becoming skilled at removing them at source
- Ability to make use of amplification of mating patterns and their components to greatly simplify and ease calculation, visualisation, calculation pressure
Requirements
- Knows how the chess pieces move
Description
Checkmate is a game-ender. You can sacrifice potentially all your pieces except for example a Knight but deliver checkmate with that Knight. Or even a pawn. As such checkmates creates great dynamic opportunities in Chess middlegames and encourages attacking and dynamic players to try and expose the opponent's King as far as possible to help enable checkmate attacks.
This course examines the patterns and processes which enable mating opportunities on the chessboard. There are various "art" forms covered in this course and artistic perspectives as well.
The basic art form of checkmates is to know the mating patterns that exist and can often be re-used or encourage deeper calculations. But other forms of checkmate often involving attracting the opponent's King out of his shelter and sometimes down the entire chess board creating an artistic effect in it's own right. Sometimes the opponent's king is simply attracted a little bit down the board and his reverse options to safety are prevented. Brining the opponent's King even just a little bit to our own resources creates an artistic effect of seeming effortless and reinforces the importance of King safety independent of the opponent potentially sacrificing many pieces. The King is a sensitive piece especially in the Opening and middlegame but can of course be freer in general to come out to play and be useful in endgames. Even in endgames though, dangers of being mated need to be factored in continually, and may be part of the necessary way of winning certain endgames.
Who this course is for:
- Beginner to intermediate chess players
- More advanced players wanting to check out checkmates of World champions and other great players
Instructor
![Tryfon Gavriel](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.7 Instructor Rating
- 1,617 Reviews
- 7,198 Students
- 23 Courses
Tryfon Gavriel, also known as "Kingscrusher" on the Internet. I am a FIDE Candidate Master (CM), British Regional Chess Master, and run a popular Youtube channel for many years with over 114k+ Subs as of 2021 and a Silver Button Award.
I have done many shows on commercial chess servers. I am also the Webmaster of the correspondence style chess server Chessworld which emphasizes game quality and research.
Playing experience
Over 35 years of playing activity both online and offline. Peak ICC blitz rating of 2625 (18-Jun-1999). Peak ICC 5 min auto-pairing of 2383 (29-Jun 2012). ECF Grading peak classical: 212 (A) ECF. Peak Rapid rating: 217 (C). Lichess marathon top 10 finishers in 3 marathons so far. In the other two, top 50 finishers. Won quite a few tournaments at lichess
One of my earliest Over-the-board achievements in Chess was winning the Lloyds Under 18 national UK tournament in 1989. My trophy was awarded to me by Grandmaster and Ph.D. Mathematician Dr John Nunn.
Teaching experience
I have done teaching in Schools and also have done teaching online with several Lichess students on a regular basis, and have a very good coaching rating at lichess.
Other experiences
Played twice in the main British Chess championship. Many of my Youtube viewers claim big rating increases after watching my videos.
Best skills
I particularly love chess tactics and combinations, and it is probably no accident that my "Complete Guide to Chess Tactics" has been a best-seller since near inception here at Udemy.
In general, I will try and give you greater enthusiasm for the game and in particular the dynamic aggressive tactical aspects of playing chess. My favorite heroes are Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, and Mikhail Tal. if you want to be a dynamic aggressive player, I may be able to encourage you and find you relevant resources on that path. The dynamic aggressive were particularly strong tactically and would often trade off pawn structure neatness and material to try and checkmate the opponent's kings. Checkmate does win the game :)
Chess Openings
In terms of concrete openings to make use of potentially teaching here at Udemy through courses, I like Solid openings on such as the London System. I also like provocative openings like the Knight's Tango systems to encourage weaknesses from opponents. I am also at faster time controls especially, particularly fond of aggressive openings and gambits. As an example, the Smith-Morra Gambit vs the Sicilian Defence, and other gambits can be used aggressively even with the black pieces such as the Albin Counter Gambit. Gambits vary of course in soundness and it is important to teach what "ticks many boxes" for use in various time controls. In the search for the ideal courses to provide you, I like to search within myself for my core strengths and passions within the passion of Chess.
I truly hope you enjoy my courses and they improve your chess and your enjoyment of chess generally - and life generally :)