Checkmate – puzzle for 21 October 2026

Checkmate is a daily chess puzzle: each day you get three positions (easy, medium and hard), and in each one you must deliver checkmate in a single move.

Positions come from the Lichess open puzzle database (CC0 licence) and are taken from real games.

How to play

1. Check whose turn it is and find the move that delivers mate.
2. Drag the piece, or tap it and then tap the target square.
3. You have three tries per position.
4. Once all three levels are solved, you can share your result.

Tips

• Look at every checking move first: mate is always a check.
• See where the king can escape and which piece can cover those squares.
• Common patterns: back-rank mate, smothered mate, queen and bishop working together.

Strategy

• Start with your opponent's last move, which the board highlights. That move is often what weakened the king: it left a guarded square, opened a diagonal or blocked the king's own escape route.
• Count the squares around the king. For mate every flight square must be covered, and the checking piece must be impossible to capture or block. If a candidate move leaves even one free square, look elsewhere.
• Don't overlook the quiet pieces. A pinned defender or a distant rook often covers the one square that makes the mate work, and on the hard level the answer is often a less obvious piece.
• Promotion can deliver mate too, and the queen is not always the right choice: sometimes a pawn that becomes a knight gives mate because it attacks a square the queen would not.

A worked example

An invented example: White has a king on g1 and a rook on e1. Black's king is on g8 behind pawns on f7, g7 and h7. Black's rook has just gone from a8 to a2 to grab a pawn, leaving the back rank, and nothing stands on the e-file.

Check it: Re8 gives check. The king cannot step forward because its own pawns are in the way, and f8 and h8 are covered by the rook on the eighth rank. Black has no piece that can capture the rook or block. It is mate, the classic back-rank pattern. If you play a wrong move instead, the game shows it, takes it back and lets you try again.

History of the game

Mate puzzles are almost as old as chess. Masters of shatranj, the medieval Arabic form of the game, already collected composed positions called mansubat, and in the 19th century chess problems became an art form of their own, with composers publishing mate-in-two and mate-in-three studies.

Today's online puzzles come from a different source. Lichess, the free and open-source chess site, uses computer analysis to mine real games for positions where a single strong move decides everything. Our three daily positions come from that open database, with the difficulty level set by each puzzle's Lichess rating.

Frequently asked questions

Is it suitable for beginners?

Yes. The easy level is beginner friendly, and the hard level challenges stronger players too.

Where do the puzzles come from?

From the Lichess open database (CC0); we pick three positions a day by difficulty.

Do I lose a try for an illegal move?

No. The board does not accept illegal moves; only legal moves that fail to mate count as a try.

What if more than one move gives mate?

Any move that delivers checkmate is accepted, even if it is not the move played in the original game.