In my previous two hubs I looked at two different types of knight checkmates:

Brilliant Opening Checkmates with the Knights , which showed a lot of fun examples of smothered mates in the opening

, which showed a lot of fun examples of smothered mates in the opening Checkmate with 2 Knights that showed examples of two knights working together to deliver checkmate.

This article will look at a special case of the Checkmate with 2 Knights called Legal's Mate that comes up so often that it deserves its own article.

One of the most important things to learn when studying this tactical motif, is to learn the subtle positional differences when it works, and when it doesn't work.

While looking several a bunch of games in my Tactics Time database where the white side performed a Legal's mate, black could have punished black by not taking the Queen on d1, and often could have won a piece.



Lets look at some examples!



