The Bishop and Knight Mate

INTRODUCTION

The Bishop and Knight Mate is the most difficult of the so-called “elementary” mates and there is nothing elementary about them for a beginner player.  Some positions can take up to thirty five moves to realize, and some techniques laborious to learn for a beginner player. To top it all, this mate rarely surfaces in practical play.

So why learn it? It is my belief that mastering this mate can help increase our ability to coordinate pieces in general. Whether we are conducting an attack, maneuvering for defensive purposes, or simply developing our pieces in the opening -all these require the effective harmonization of our pieces. The Bishop and Knight Mate is one of the purest examples of piece harmony in chess. In order to succeed, the attacker’s King and minor pieces must work in perfect harmony or else the mate cannot be executed. According to official chess rules, the attacker has fifty moves to exact mate. This demands that the attacker be precise, understand the goal at hand, and be technically fluent. 

The Bishop and Knight Mate can be an effective tool in helping beginner students exercise and understand important chess concepts and techniques for other areas of the game. Some of these are:

• Coordination of the pieces
• Temporizing moves
• Zugzwang
• The opposition
• Centralization
• Stalemating
• Square and diagonal control 
• Natural abilities of the minor pieces
• Visualization

GOAL

Our goal is to mate in the same corner as the color of the bishop.

(The highlighted squares show alternative mating squares)

The above diagrams are examples of end positions we want to aim for, although it sometimes happens that the defender makes a gross error and gets caught while being driven to the right corner…

 

We must be alert all the way, especially in the last stages, as we do not want to stalemate our opponent…

 

CHALLENGES

The defending King can be quite unpredictable in his struggle. He may try to stay in the center until forced to move, or try heading to another edge once he has been confined to one.  Sometimes the defender is content to shuffle his King back and forth to any adjacent squares available, when the attacker must carefully reposition his pieces to take those squares away without letting him slip out to the center of the board. 

Sometimes the King runs to the corner that cannot be controlled by the attacker’s bishop, where we must learn the right technique for driving him over to the correct corner (the correct corner is one that matches the color of the attacker’s bishop. Light square for a light squared bishop, and dark for dark).

Sometimes the King seems to be heading for a corner, and in the way, changes his mind and heads somewhere else if allowed to. Anything to confuse the opponent will do. Even the actual playing position can be a challenge as some positions take longer to execute than others.

STRATEGY

• The attacker takes squares away from the defending King until it is driven to the edge of the board.

In the initial position the defender can choose to roam just about anywhere on the board. We can aim towards confining him to a group of squares. Once we achieve this, we proceed to confine him to an even smaller number of squares, until the King is incarcerated in the edge of the board, or in one of the corners.  

• We drive him to the appropriate corner.

Here we need to arm ourselves with some techniques to drive the King over to the correct corner, otherwise we run the risk of letting the King out of the wedge we’ve created, or worse, stalemate him.

• We checkmate.

This sounds obvious, but we can easily stalemate our opponent if careless. Sometimes the attacker needs to first reposition his pieces without letting the King out of the mating net, and then checkmate.