Preventing your King from being mated in a Chess games
Sunday, 12. July 2009
The chess player’s King is recognized as “check” when an opponent’s piece attacks it. For chess beginners, it is usually announced to ensure that the opponent knows the situation. However, for experienced chess players, many of them consider it rude to announce a “check” because they expect to notice the situation by themselves. It is not legal to move your King into a check position so if you saw your opponent unconsciously done it, point this out and allow them to move into safety instead and continue your game.
If your King is in the check position, you must find a way to avoid it from being captured by your opponent and lose the game. In this article, there are three ways explained to be able to prevent you King from being mated by your opponent. You can continue to read if you want to learn them.
First method is to move your King into safety. If your King can still be moved to a safe square where it is not attacked, you can just move him there. As long as there is a possible square that is free from the opponent’s attack, you can move your King in there and safely avoid being captured. However, while avoiding the check, you also need to think of counter attacks to be able to neutralize the advantage of your opponent.
The second method of preventing your king from being captured is by blocking the check by your another available chess piece. This is commonly known as interposition. However, when the attacking piece is a knight, blocking is not an option because knights can jump over any chess pieces that are interposing. However, any other piece can be blocked. You just need to think carefully so that you can still gain advantage in that situation.
The third and final method is by capturing the opponent’s attacking piece. This can be the best among the three methods. If you can capture the attacking pieces, it can not do more attacks in the future and you can rest assure that it can not harm your King during the course of the game.
If your King is under attack and none of these methods can possibly be used to prevent your king from being captured, the result is completely your lost because it is checkmate. There are no safe squares for your King to move, there are no other chess piece that an block the attack, and you cannot capture the opponent’s attacking piece so it is checkmate and you lose the game.
Remember that checkmate ends the chess game immediately. So be very careful in considering your every movements to prevent your checkmate. It is said to be that a chess game is stalemate when one of the chess player has no legal movement but not in check. This situation ends the chess game as a draw. Stalemates are very common among chess beginners who have not yet learned the patterns in checkmating. Be careful in the endgame because even you have big advantages, it can result to a draw because of a very unfortunate stalemate.
