Chessable Course Review: The Checkmate Patterns Manual

About as "modern classic" a Chessable course can get

The Problem with Chess Tactics Books

In my experience there is hardly ever an absolute must-have chess tactics books. I have multiple reasons for thinking this, but chief among them is the fact that there are just too many decent collections of tactics out there. Of course, there are some highlights out there that do better than others, but in general, a good tactics book consists of puzzles and solutions, and the benefits end up being just the same.

Nevertheless, here I am writing a review for a tactics course (or book, if that strikes your fancy), because in this case, I think The Checkmate Patterns Manual is something special.

For the record, I’m reviewing just the MoveTrainer course portion, and not the optional videos (either IM John Bartholomew or IM Christof Silecki). I’m not a fan of video courses in general, but especially for tactics. That’s just my sense of taste — yours may differ. I’ve always felt that I should be able to interrogate a collection of puzzles on my own without the need for video guidance.

A year or so ago I reviewed How To Beat Your Dad At Chess. I gave it a high rating, but I also provided a caveat in the concluding paragraphs:

There is one main problem that prevents me from saying this book is a must-have — and it’s not really the book’s fault, because this book is excellent. The issue is that the Checkmate Patterns Manual by Raf Mesotten exists, both in book form and in the original Chessable course form, and in my opinion has virtually made HTBYDAC obsolete because the content is better organized, the examples more thorough, and CPM comes with 1000 exercises. I have the Chessable course version and in my opinion, it is a must-have course because of how thorough and helpful and informative it is.

You can read the full review here, if you’re curious:

The tl;dr of this review will be basically the same thing:

• The content is organized extremely well.

• There are a lot of examples.

• The course comes with 1000 variations — quite a bit more than the book to which I was comparing it.

That said, let’s get into the details:

The Content

The course has 36 “chapters” — a few informational ones including some player indices, then a basic test with very simplified versions of the mates. Then come all the mates.

I like the way Raf Mesotten breaks down the mates by piece configuration. There are other ways to break down checkmates, but this is probably the easiest way to learn the mechanics of each checkmate pattern. To wit, Raf teaches us the following mates:

• Anastasia’s Mate

• Greco’s Mate

• Arabian mate

• Hook mate

• Vukovic’s mate (so-called because of its prominence in the classic positional attacking manual The Art of Attack in Chess by Vladmir Vukovic)

• Smothered mate

• Suffocation mate (a smothered mate with the help of a piece covering the king’s luft square.

• Corner mate

• Morphy’s Mate

• Pillsbury’s mate

• Opera mate / Mayet’s mate

• Lolli’s mate

• Domiano’s mate

• Max Lange’s mate

• Damiano’s bishop mate

• Dovetail mate / Gueridon mate

• David & Goliath mate / Pawn mate

• Boden’s mate

• Balestra mate

• Double knights mate

• Double bishops mate

• Blackburne’s mate

• Blind swine mate

• Epaulette mate

• Back rank mate

• Lawnmower mate

• Triangle mate

• Kill box mate

• Mate in the Opening

That’s a lot of mates! And yet these are the most common ones that a beginner or intermediate player is likely to see in their own games. There may be some mating patterns Raf missed, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find which ones.

Each of these mating patterns come with at least one, but usually several increasingly-complex or deep variations of the same pattern. For instance, the Damiano’s Bishop mate’s first variation is the following. Raf says of this mate: “In Damiano’s bishop mate, the queen delivers checkmate at the edge of the board, while being protected by a bishop.”

White to play and mate in 2.

The second variation of the Damiano’s Bishop mate consists of a rook sacrifice to assist in the mating attack:

White to play and mate in 2.

The third version combines the first two:

White to play and mate in 2.

The fourth variation then switches things into high gear. Raf begins with a sample that is mate in 7:

White to play and mate in 7 moves.

There are two more examples of the Damiano’s Bishop Mate after this. In general, the idea is to introduce the basic elements of the mate, then increase the complexity and intricacies of the mating pattern to show how you can arrive at the same essential ending position from further away. Sometimes, the themes branch out rather than extend the original idea, but they’re all related to the core pattern.

Most of the mating patterns get at least two or more variations which systematically build upon each other, and in between these variations, the student is given multiple puzzles to solve to reinforce the pattern which was just learned. This very thorough approach means that there are a lot of puzzles to solve, and this course can keep you busy for a very long time, especially if you use the typical spaced repetition that MoveTrainer automatically schedules — you will have a full set of puzzles to do for a very long time.

After all the introductory chapters, the student is then given three chapters that mix up all the themes and patterns to test their mettle.

• Puzzles: Warm-up

• Puzzles: Exercises

• Final Test

These make up the bulk of the course: almost 600 exercises are contained in this last section, with 100 being dedicated to the “Final Test” — a series of the most difficult puzzles in the course. These can take a few minutes or more each, and you’re best served being patient as you try to solve each one.

Virtually every puzzle comes from master games — whether the actual text move or game analysis. These range from very early historical examples to games from modern players still alive and competing today — this means you can get a little bit of chess culture if you care to pay attention to who played the games and when. Additionally, as a bonus for Chessable users (though I’m unsure if this applies to those using the book version) all of the games that gave us these positions are included in their entirety. So if you’re really interested, you can see these games. That makes this course an incidental collection of around 900(!) full games, albeit mostly non-annotated, if you have any curiosity in just exactly how the losing player got their game featured in the course.

How to study the Checkmate Patterns Manual

As far as studying the course, there are a few things I would suggest, depending on your level:

• If you consider yourself a beginner:

  • Thoroughly read all the annotations. This is not a wordy book, so every word counts. Try to understand everything you can.

  • Set the puzzle timer to infinite.

  • Try not to move the pieces (whether on a real board or online) before you’ve calculated out the entire checkmate.

  • Do all of the Basic Test in one session. Record your time spent and accuracy, and make special note of the patterns you missed. I also suggest pausing this chapter.

  • Then, do one chapter at a time, in order.

  • If you’re using the chessable spaced repetition system (e.g. the default), then always do your reviews before learning a new pattern.

    • Make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s better to review 20 variations and learn 6 more, than to go through a bunch of patterns all in a row and end up with 100 to review at once in four hours and overwhelm yourself. In other words, pace yourself!

  • Once you feel like you understand every pattern, optionally pause all the chapters, then un-pause the Basic Test. How did you do this time? Hopefully the answers came quicker and more accurately.

  • If the Basic Test is feeling too easy, move on to the Puzzles: Warm-up chapter, then the Exercises, and, when you’re feeling up to it, try your hand at the Final Test (but warning: These can be very difficult)

• If you consider yourself an intermediate player, or if you’ve gone through the course a few times like I have:

  • Consider resetting your progress through the course and starting from scratch. I especially recommend this if you’re coming back to this course after having studied it a long time ago.

  • Consider using Chessable’s “Cyclical” schedule — give yourself four to six weeks to complete the entire course rather than using spaced repetition, especially if you find that the exercises themselves are rather easy to solve. Your pattern recognition may not be the primary skill you want to build — these puzzles can constitute a nice refresher or warm-up before you tackle more complex puzzles.

  • Highly consider turning off hints. Pattern recognition can get in the way of looking at the positions with fresh eyes. You want to build pattern recognition, but you don’t want to mindlessly play moves. I find that turning off hints (meaning, no text prompts, nor knowledge of the game from which the position came) can be very helpful in making sure you don’t autopilot your way through the course (I find that this can be a really bad habit akin to the impulsive decisions a blitz or bullet addict makes). You can retain a lot of knowledge of the resulting positions even years after seeing them if you know that this position comes from a famous game between Alekhine and Yates, for instance. You want to stop your brain muscles from “cheating” years after the fact and make sure you engage actively with the material again.

  • Try to have another course or book or collection of puzzles that isn’t focused entirely just on checkmates. Checkmates end the game in a flash, but at a certain point, your opponents will not blunder due to a mutual recognition of tactics. You need more than just checkmate skills!

Other than that, there’s not much else to say. I think that The Checkmate Patterns Manual is about as “classic” as an online Chessable MoveTrainer course could possibly get. Chessable must think so too, because they even put this one into actual print! It’s one of the most-reviewed and highly-rated tactics courses on Chessable and I think that any club player (heck, even masters use this course!) will see why once they delve into the depths of the many facets of the checkmate.

5/5