As we have seen in our lesson about the fork any piece can create a fork, even a pawn or a King. However the most common fork is the Knight fork. The way the Knight moves makes it more likely that the threat is overlooked.
I have created some knight fork exercises, but before trying to solve these it may be a good idea to re-read the lessons mentioned above.
Some days ago I have upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5. As far as I know without problems, but please let me know if you detect something strange.
The evergreen game is (like the immortal game) another famous chess game from Adolf Anderssen. The game was played against Jean Dufresne in 1852 and can also be found in the ICOFY database that we have used during one of our previous lessons. The name evergreen means something like “Forever Young”.
The whole game can be replayed below, but I think that the most interesting part of the game are the last moves starting from the position in the diagram below.
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This is a mate in four exercise. Can you solve it, or do you have to look at the full game?
The mating pattern is rather nice.
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Let’s have a look at the next diagram taken from a real game played in 2007. It is White’s turn to move.
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Before reading further try to figure this out by yourself.
In addition to the smothered mate, in which the mated king is unable to move because all the surrounding squares are occupied by his own pieces, there are a lot of mating patterns in which the king is only partly smothered by his own pieces.
Let’s have a look at the next diagram and try to figure out how to exploit that Black’s king is almost smothered.
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