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The first diagram shows the basic checkmate position with a rook, which can occur on any edge of the board. In the second checkmate position, the kings are in opposition and the queen mates on the rank (or file) of the king. In the first of the checkmate positions, the queen is directly in front of the opposing king and the white king is protecting its queen. Naturally, the exact position can vary from the diagram. The first two diagrams show representatives of the basic checkmate positions with a queen, which can occur on any edge of the board. The two-bishop checkmate is fairly easy to accomplish, but the bishop and knight checkmate is difficult and requires precision. A checkmate with the rook is also common, but a checkmate with two bishops or with a bishop and knight occurs infrequently. It often occurs after a pawn has queened. The checkmate with the queen is the most common, and easiest to achieve. If the winning side has more material, checkmates are easier. The king must help in accomplishing all of these checkmates. (1) one queen, (2) one rook, (3) two bishops on opposite-colored squares, or (4) a bishop and a knight. There are four fundamental checkmates when one side has only their king and the other side has only the minimum material needed to force checkmate, i.e. The ladder checkmate can be used to checkmate with two rooks, two queens, or a rook and a queen. In the illustration, White checkmates by forcing the Black king to the edge, one row at a time. The process is to put the two pieces on adjacent ranks or files and force the king to the side of the board by using one piece to check the king and the other to cut it off from going up the board. Two major pieces ( queens or rooks) can easily force checkmate on the edge of the board using a technique known as the ladder checkmate. In Medieval times, players began to consider it nobler to win by checkmate, so annihilation became a half-win for a while, until it was abandoned. This style of play is now called annihilation or robado. īefore about 1600, the game could also be won by capturing all of the opponent's pieces, leaving just a bare king. As a result, the king could not be captured, and checkmate was the only decisive way of ending a game. Later the Persians added the additional rule that a king could not be moved into check or left in check. This was done to avoid the early and accidental end of a game. 700–800) introduced the idea of warning that the king was under attack (announcing check in modern terminology). 500–700), the king could be captured and this ended the game. In modern parlance, the term checkmate is a metaphor for an irrefutable and strategic victory. This interpretation is much closer to the original intent of the game being not to kill a king but to leave him with no viable response other than surrender, which better matches the origin story detailed in the Shahnameh. A king being mate (shah-mat) then means a king is unable to respond, which would correspond to there being no response that a player's king can make to the opponent's final move. So a possible alternative would be to interpret mate as "unable to respond". The words "stupefied" or "stunned" bear close correlation.
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In modern Persian, the word mate depicts a person who is frozen, open-mouthed, staring, confused and unresponsive. So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, helpless, defeated, or abandoned to his fate. "Māt" ( مات) is a Persian adjective for "at a loss", "helpless", or "defeated". Players would announce "Shāh" when the king was in check. "Shāh" ( شاه) is the Persian word for the monarch.
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It means "remained" in the sense of "abandoned" and the formal translation is "surprised", in the military sense of "ambushed". It comes from a Persian verb mandan ( ماندن), meaning "to remain", which is cognate with the Latin word maneō and the Greek menō ( μένω, which means "I remain"). Moghadam traced the etymology of the word mate. Others maintain that it means "the King is dead", as chess reached Europe via the Arab world, and Arabic māta ( مَاتَ) means "died" or "is dead".
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Persian "māt" applies to the king but in Sanskrit "māta", also pronounced "māt", applied to his kingdom "traversed, measured across, and meted out" thoroughly by his opponent "māta" is the past participle of "mā" verbal root. The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Persian phrase "shāh māt" ( شاه مات) which means "the King is helpless". Look up checkmate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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