Sooner or later you will reach a position where your opponent has nothing left but a king, and you have a queen or a rook. The game is won — but only if you know how to finish it. Plenty of players have thrown away half a point by chasing a lone king around the board until the fifty-move rule ended the game, or until they stalemated it by accident.
The good news is that these endings are completely solved. From any position, a king and queen can force checkmate against a lone king in at most 10 moves; a king and rook, in at most 16; two rooks, in at most 7. You don’t need to find the fastest way — you just need a method that always works. Here are three.
With a single queen or a single rook, a lone king can only be mated on the edge of the board: in the middle, it always has somewhere to go. (With two rooks and your own king working together, a mate in the middle is possible — but the simplest method doesn’t need one.) So every method below has the same two stages: first push the king to an edge, then deliver the mate there.
The other thing all three have in common: your own king has to help, except with two rooks. A queen or a rook on its own can drive the enemy king back, but it cannot mate without its king standing close by.
This is the easiest, and the best one to learn first, because it teaches the idea of cutting the king off. The two rooks work like the rungs of a ladder: one rook fences the king off along a rank, the other gives check on the next rank, and they take turns, pushing the king back one row at a time until it reaches the edge.
The only thing to watch is the enemy king coming towards your rooks. If it gets close to one, move that rook to the far side of the board, along the same rank, and carry on. Your own king does not need to take part at all.
The queen is powerful enough to herd the king on her own; she just can’t finish the job without help. The simplest method uses one trick: place the queen a knight’s move away from the enemy king.
From there, every time the king moves, move the queen so that she is again a knight’s move away from it, on the same side. Each time, the box the king can live in gets smaller, until it is pinned against an edge. Then stop moving the queen, and bring your own king up.
The mate itself comes when your king stands in front of the enemy king, and the queen gives check right next to it, protected by your king.
With a queen, the one real danger is not failing to mate but stalemating by accident. The queen covers so many squares that it is easy to take away the enemy king’s last move without giving check.
The habit that prevents it is to ask, before every move once the king is on the edge: after this, does my opponent still have a legal move? If not, and you are not giving check, play something else. There is more on this in Check, checkmate and stalemate.
With a single rook the method is slower, and your king has more work to do. The rook cuts the enemy king off along a rank or file, and your king walks up to support it. The mate comes when the two kings face each other with one square between them — this is called the opposition — and the rook gives check along the edge.
Timing is everything. If the kings are not directly opposite each other, the same rook check is not mate — the enemy king just steps out of the way.
So the rook often has to make a quiet waiting move — along its rank, away from the kings — so that the enemy king is forced to step into the opposition itself. That waiting move is what makes the rook ending feel difficult at first. Once you have seen it a few times, it becomes automatic.
These mates are worth practising until you can do them without thinking — ideally until they are a little boring. Then, when one turns up at the end of a long game with the clock running, you will finish it in a few seconds instead of letting the win slip. Our lessons walk you through the queen and rook mates on the board, move by move.
Chess pieces: “cburnett” set by Colin M. L. Burnett, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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