Learning common chess endings is very important. You never know when you’ll end up in that situation, and when you are, you have to be able to win. Though a two bishop ending is rare, it is important to know how to get a win when in the situation. Let’s take a look at how to checkmate with two bishops.

The first step in checkmating with 2 bishops is to get your king one square from the center. The center squares on a chessboard are d4, d5, e4, and e5, so we need to get our king to a square which attacks one of the center squares.

After a few moves, we can now get to this position:

From here, we are free to move both of our bishops to d4 and e4. The goal of moving our king to d3 is to get our bishops to d4 and e4 as the king is defending those squares. As such, after a few moves, we can get to this position:

If you take a look, the two bishops are dominating the board, restricting the king to only these squares:

If we want to restrict the king even further, we will need to push the king to get our bishops to d5 and e5 so that the king has even less squares to go to. At the moment, we cannot do that as the black king will capture the bishop, so we have to defend one of the squares so our bishop can move there. To do that, we can play Kc4. Now, after the black king moves, we can move our king over to c5. Then, we can move the bishop to d5 and then the other bishop to e5. The position should now look similar to this:

We can now repeat the process one more time. It is important to note that this time, our king should not go to the 7th rank; rather, it should remain on the 6th rank.

Now, we need to push the black king towards the side of the white king. As you can see, we have pushed the black king to just one rank, but we need it to go to just one corner now. The best move in this position would be to play a waiting move. This move would be to move the light colored bishop to any square on the a2 g8 diagonal excluding f7.

Now, once the black king moves to the only square it can go to, d8, we can play Bf7.

Next, the black king is forced to move to c8 to which we can now play Be7. This forces the black king to go to b8 to which we can play Kb6. This forces the black king to go to either two squares.

If black plays Kc8, then we can play Be6+ to which black must play Kb8. Then, we can pay Bd6+ to which black must play Ka8. Finally, we can play Bd5#.

Instead of Kc8, if black plays Ka8, we will still play Be6 to which black has to play Kb8. We can now continue with Bd6+. Black must play Ka8, and we can now checkmate with Bd5.

Two Bishop Checkmate

Basic Ideas of the Opening

Smothered Mate