Definition, Meaning & Synonyms | English word CHECKMATE

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Definitions of CHECKMATE

1. The conclusive victory in a game of chess that occurs when an opponent's king is threatened with unavoidable capture.
2. (chess) Word called out by the victor when making a move that wins the game.
3. (by extension) Said when one has placed a person in a losing situation with no escape.
4. (figuratively, by extension) Any losing situation with no escape; utter defeat.
5. (transitive, chess) To put the king of an opponent into checkmate.
6. (transitive, by extension) To place in a losing situation that has no escape.

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Examples of Using CHECKMATE in a Sentence

• The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king; checkmate occurs when a king is threatened with capture and has no escape.
• Sometimes the objective is antithetical to normal chess, such as helping (or even compelling) the opponent to checkmate one's own king.
• If Black promotes, then the only way for White towards a forced checkmate in the stipulated number of moves is to promote a pawn to the same piece to which Black promoted.
• The rules for dropping pieces are identical to those in standard shogi: all dropped pieces must start unpromoted (even if they have been captured as promoted pieces and/or are dropped into the farthest rank); a pawn may not be dropped onto the farthest rank, or onto a square that results in an immediate checkmate; the two pawns may not lie in the same file when they belong to the same player.
• It is a helpmate in four (Black moves first and cooperates with White to checkmate him within four moves).
• The problem is a helpmate in 2, which means Black moves first and cooperates with White to move to a position where Black is in checkmate after White's second move.
• If seventy-five moves are made without a pawn move or capture being made, the game is drawn unless the seventy-fifth move delivers a checkmate.
• However, the game is drawn if the position is such that the opponent cannot checkmate the player's king by any possible series of legal moves, even with the most unskilled counterplay.
• Because the nature of helpmates sees Black and White cooperating, the play in helpmates may seem to be a great deal simpler than in directmates (the most common type of problem, where White tries to checkmate Black, and Black tries to avoid being mated).
• The continuation's mating position is a model mate, a strong form of pure mate in which all of the attacker's remaining pieces contribute to the checkmate, while the mated king is prevented from moving to any other square for exactly one reason per square.
• Ke4, with checkmate: the king patrols the rook on e3 giving check and guarding b3 and d3; the rook on a2 is patrolled by the knight on b4 and so controls the squares b2, c2 and d2; Kd4 is not possible because the black king, patrolled by the e3 rook, controls that square; and Kxb4 is not possible because the white king is not patrolled and so cannot capture.
• In chess, a smothered mate is a checkmate delivered by a knight in which the mated king is unable to move because it is completely surrounded (or smothered) by its own pieces, which a knight can jump over.
• A checkmate may occur in as few as two moves on one side with all of the pieces still on the board (as in fool's mate, in the opening phase of the game), in a middlegame position (as in the 1956 game called the Game of the Century between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fischer), or after many moves with as few as three pieces in an endgame position.
• In chess, fool's mate is the checkmate delivered after the fewest possible moves from the game's starting position.
• The program's restrictions were: no castling, no double pawn move, no en passant capture, no pawn promotion, and no distinction between checkmate and stalemate.
• Chess has five ways of ending or achieving a draw from an opponent: stalemate, agreement between the players, the fifty-move rule (and its extension, seventy-five-move rule), threefold repetition (and its extension, fivefold repetition), or neither player having sufficient material to checkmate.
• Also known as imperial fiddlesticks, there is no checking or checkmate in kinglet chess – kings are treated like any normal piece.
• On the toroidal board, checkmate is impossible with king and queen versus king, but it is possible with king and two rooks versus king.
• If the side with the knights carelessly captures the other side's extra material, the game devolves to the basic two knights endgame, and the opportunity to force checkmate may be lost.

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