Best Checkmate Patterns Courses

Checkmate patterns can be learned largely for free: Lichess Practice, its named-mate puzzle themes and a free list of named mates cover a lot of the ground, and a paid course is only worth it if you want hundreds of repetitions in a fixed order. The best-documented paid options are Chessable's Crawl, Walk, Checkmate! at $19.99 list for beginners (as of 8 November 2026) and ChessMood's Mating Matador for 1200-2200.

ChessCourseFinder has not joined any affiliate program, so links here earn nothing today. Read our affiliate disclosure.

Test depth: Public information only. Nobody at ChessCourseFinder has taken these courses. This page uses seller pages and linked sources read on 8 November 2026. How we review explains the limits. This page is part of our skills guides.

What pattern training actually involves

There are two different jobs here. One is forcing the basic mates from any starting position: king and queen against king, and king and rook against king. The other is recognising mating nets in the middlegame, where the shape tells you a sacrifice or quiet move may work.

Names are the least important part. What you are learning for each pattern is which piece gives the mate, which piece protects it if needed, and what stops the king from escaping. Five examples, all with White to move and mate in one:

Paste a FEN into any analysis board and find the mate before reading on. The answers, in order, are Ra8, Nf7, Rh7, Rh3 and Ba6.

Mating patterns overlap heavily with tactics; mates built from a pin or deflection are tactics too. A puzzle trainer with a mate theme can also do this job.

How to tell whether you need this

These are common coaching checks, and the score lines are our suggestion rather than a validated standard.

1. Basic mates. Can you force mate with king and queen, then king and rook, against a computer, from a position you did not choose, inside the 50-move limit? If not, start there.
2. Mate in two. Solve 20 mate-in-two puzzles with no clock. Fewer than about 16 correct suggests real room for pattern work. Lichess shows 838,562 such puzzles (themes page, 8 November 2026).
3. Escape-square test. Before you play a mating move in a puzzle, say which piece or pawn covers each square next to the king. Struggling to explain it means you may be solving by feel.
4. Your own games. Run ten games through a review tool and count the forced mates of three moves or fewer that either side missed.
5. The real cause of losses. If your games end earlier because of loose pieces, blunder prevention comes first.

A sensible order of study

This is received coaching wisdom, with no study behind it:

1. Basic mates, using Lichess Practice's Piece Checkmates I.
2. The common nets. Chessworld's trainer starts beginners on back-rank, smothered, Arabian, queen-and-bishop, Légal's and simple rook mates.
3. Rook-and-knight edge mates such as Anastasia's and the hook mate.
4. Queen-contact mates and bishop mates such as Boden's.
5. Rare named mates, only once the common ones come quickly.
6. Build-ups: the sacrifices and quiet moves that create the final net.

Chessworld suggests a method worth copying: begin one move before mate, name the pattern, check the king's escape squares, reveal the move, then replay the whole game to see how the net was built. The site sells courses of its own. ChessMood's study plan puts its own Tactic Ninja before Mating Matador and BlunderProof after it (study plan), though that is a seller ordering its own products.

Why solve instead of watch. Two memory studies fit the shape of this training, within clear limits. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that students who took recall tests on prose passages kept more after two days and a week than students who reread them (Crossref record). Cepeda and colleagues (2006) found that the best gap between study sessions grew with how long the material had to be retained (abstract record). Neither used chess: one used text and the other verbal recall. Whether spotting a mating net behaves like recalling words is not something these papers show, so treat "solve the patterns and come back to them after a gap" as a reasonable inference and not a proven method.

What to buy by level

Levels are approximate.

• Under about 1000: free. Lichess Practice has a Checkmates section (Piece Checkmates I-II, Checkmate Patterns I-IV, Knight and Bishop Mate) (Lichess Practice).
• About 1000 to 1500: a puzzle-based mate course is cheap and reasonable. Crawl, Walk, Checkmate! is described as for novices and beginners.
• About 1200 to 2200: Mating Matador, if you also want named patterns and are paying for ChessMood anyway.

How we chose

We looked for stated pattern coverage, a stated number of exercises, a stated level, and a price we could read.

The best-documented options

Mating Matador

The page lists 37 named patterns, one per section, and nearly every section has six episodes and 15 puzzles. Its coach is GM Avetik Grigoryan per the page. Downsides: $350 alone is high for a pattern list you can find free; calculated from listed figures it is about $60 per listed hour and $0.63 per listed puzzle. No date appears on the page.

Two details are easy to miss. The preview unlocks 14 lessons and 30 puzzles, which is the introduction plus Epaulette and Swallow's Tail, so you cannot sample the Back Rank section (number 13) or the Smothered section (number 32) before paying. The order of sections is also not explained on the page, so do not assume it runs from most to least useful.

How much of Mating Matador is available free by name?

We compared the section list with the free lists on 8 November 2026. Of Mating Matador's 37 names, 32 appear on ChessFox's free list, counting Cozio's Mate, which ChessFox also calls the Dovetail, and Diagonal Corridor, which ChessFox lists under Corridor Mate. The other five are Bucking Bronco, Sneaky Stallion, Bombardiers', Two Knights' and Collaboration. On the same basis, 18 of Lichess's 19 named-mate puzzle themes match a Mating Matador section; only "Double bishop" does not appear as a section title.

A shared name does not mean equal teaching, since a course may explain more and order the practice differently. What the comparison settles is narrower: you are not paying $350 for access to names you could not otherwise find.

Lichess's theme counts also give a rough sense of what to do first: Back rank 213,076 puzzles, Smothered 25,110, Arabian 7,728, Anastasia's 7,699 and Boden's 3,844 as shown on 8 November 2026. That reflects that puzzle set, not a study of how often each mate appears in your games.

Crawl, Walk, Checkmate!

By GM Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko per the page. Its size is large relative to price: calculated from $19.99, about $0.02 per puzzle. Downsides: full video costs more ($59.98, about $0.06 per puzzle), and the page level is a description ("novice and beginner"), not a rating range. Chessable's January 2025 post says paid courses carry a 30-day money-back guarantee, which makes a low-cost trial reasonable, but we could not read its terms.

1001 Checkmate Exercises

A community-authored puzzle set by SamCicero, so the page names no titled coach. It reads as a volume set rather than a taught course.

The Checkmate Patterns Manual

By Raf Mesotten, later published as a New in Chess book (376 pages per the NIC listing). We could not read the Chessable page, and the NIC page failed to load, so the details come from a search listing as of 8 November 2026; we could not open the product page directly. See our review page. A New in Chess magazine rating of 4 stars appears in that listing; NIC is the book's publisher, so it is not independent.

Do named patterns matter?

Received coaching wisdom, not a research result, is that recognising a handful of mating shapes speeds up spotting sacrifices. On that same coaching view, being able to describe the escape-square logic matters more than remembering who a mate is named after, so 37 names is not a target in itself.

What to do while paying less

Use Lichess Practice for the common mates, the themes page for repetition by pattern, and a free list for names. If a paid course helps, a $19.99 puzzle set is closer to the cost of a free-plus-small-extra approach than a $350 standalone course. Buying the ChessMood library for this one course would not make sense.

Who should skip this

Skip if you already solve mate-in-two and mate-in-three puzzles reliably, or if your games are lost earlier by hanging pieces. For attack training around the king, see attacking chess courses; for move search, calculation.

The free resource that covers the same ground

Lichess Practice's Checkmates section, Lichess's named-mate puzzle themes, and the free ChessFox pattern list (it says you can download the PDF free). Our Lichess guide explains the practice flow. For books, see the books guide; to compare more broadly, see how to choose a chess course.

If you want to try Mating Matador's first two patterns before paying, ChessMood's free Basic plan unlocks the opening section of each course.