I just can't spot a mate. Help!!

Look for Forcing Moves first:

Checks

Captures

Threats

@Brumtown - Its a beautiful mate too. If I had seen it the 1st time, then I would have remembered the game fondly. However after missing it, I just got lucky.

Pawn- Yeah I know, but still keep missing the mate sequences.

Wow you actually got do that mate!! Most satisfying mates I think.

Are you playing speed chess? You should play without a clock, or at very slow time controls. And use a real board. Play OTB instead of online if possible. Take your time on every move. You need to learn to see the board and spot forcing moves without time pressure before you start playing with time controls.

No actually if it was blitz I wouldn't worry. This was a rapid game. The thing is I play instinctively. As in I can't stop myself from moving as soon as I get the turn. Its like a trigger reaction.

I did play a lot of blitz before I realised I need to play slower games and just play Rapid games now. However the early blitz habit just gets to me. I feel there isn't a guy in the world who is as good as me at seeing the best move, exactly one second after I have made the wrong move too quickly.

As soon as I get the turn I just have to move. Even so my rapid rating is >200 point higher than my blitz rating. So I am I guess better at the slow time control games. BUt sometimes I just hurry with moves in Rapid, for no reason whatsoever. Its not like the clock is running down or something.

THe thing is I just cant help it.

OTB chess is something I should look at for sure.

I see, so you've already established bad habits. It's harder to retrain from the wrong foundation than to train correctly to begin with. But here is what will help: even if playing online, set up a real board at the computer. When your opponent makes a move, make it on your board. And make your move on the board before reproducing it on the screen. This will force you to pause between moves. Hopefully that will break this need to move right away.

And rapid is still way too fast for learning basics.

brumtown wrote:

Hi chuddog can we play a 3 day per move match?

My rating was 500 just 3 months ago and now it's 950, I just wanna reach 1000 but we can play unrated

I think it would be more useful for you to play someone closer to your level. chess.com started me on here with a 1200 daily rating for some mysterious reason, but I'm a 2400+ rated FM. I mean no offense, but it's too much of a difference to be a useful learning experience.

You would be better served finding someone a couple hundred points higher, and playing them.  

I have been thinking of doing exactly that!

 You need to do more tactics! your rating in the tactic trainer should be 200+ than your rating.  You have unlimitied tactics so id recommend putting way more time doing tactics than playing. If you actually calculate the entire line before moving a piece youll get better at calculating and finding forcing moves.  The tactics trainer basically is made up of problems much similar to the tactic in your game and it eventually becomes pattern recognition.  A person with a 1500 tt rating would see that move in less than 2s mainly because it has been ingrained in their heads over and over again.  A great way to calculate is to go through a 5 step process. 1. is there a checkmate?, 2. Is there a check. 3. Is there a capture? 4. Is there a threat?. 5. Can i improve a piece.  Doing this for every move while you calculate will lead to the most forcing line which usually leads to winning a piece or checkmate.  

I saw right away.  One way to help with this mating problem is to get a chess puzzle combination book.  They have combination puzzles, mates in ones, mate in twos.  A book I would recommend is "Chess 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games" by Laszlo Polgar.

Jayesh - Can you answer these questions: What is a Damiano's Bishop Mate? (Hint: it's what your Queen, backed by a Bishop, is threatening to do at the end your game). What patterns are Boden's Mate, the Dovetail Mate, the Swallow's Tail Mate, the Escalator Mate, and Anastasia's Mate?

If you can't identify them, it's likely your mind hasn't organized itself to easily see the patterns. It would be like seeing the letter "B" but, not learning that it has something to do with a specific sound, you would have no specific reason to remember it or to find anything special about it if you see it elsewhere. Consequently it helps to memorize the common mating patterns and their names and it should help you see them better. It has helped me. In a recent game, I saw I had a Dovetail Mate and ended a game much more quickly than expected.

I see you are doing tactics problems but not progressing a lot. I've been helped a lot by recognizing patterns better and learning them as follows:

Every time you solve a problem, think about the tactic you used, then look at the tags listed and see if you agree. If you don't know what those tactics are, Check this Chess.com page - which is excellent but awful at explaining Tactical Motifs for mates so I've got another one below:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples

A much better description of tactics, including mating patterns, is here:

http://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html

When you complete a mate, make sure you can categorize it.  If you do that enough, you'll hopefully start to see the patterns more easily as I'm finding I do!

Actually Godspawn's original answer was on to something. You simply didn't consider Qxg6 even though it was a forcing move (capture). If you were to just consider every forcing move (check, capture, threat) every move you would have gotten this mate. This isn't the same as other mates which consist of one or more silent moves and are difficult to find. This is just capture check mate.

Not considering forcing moves because they look silly will hurt every part of your game: You'll miss tactics, material and mates. And it's a very easy fix. Simply consider every capture, check, and threat on the board before moving!

Guys thank you for the suggestions. I see most of you suggesting tactics. I do tactics, but I feel there is a fundamental difference between tactics and an actual game. Maybe because I don't fully understand it, but there it is.

The difference I feel is that when I am doing tactics, I know that there is definitely a trick here. All I have to do is find it. However not in every position in a game does a trick exist. So I feel tactics in a way spoil me, as tactics are 'arranged' or deliberately 'fixed' in a way for a trick to exist. I feel that such doctoring of pieces will not happen in an actual game.

That has been the thinking behind not doing too many tactics. I instead choose to focus on the games, or atleast have chosen to focus on games so far.

I know pattern recognition is one aspect, but how do you know if a trick/tactic involves in an actual game in a position. I mean you could go on looking for one, even when just one exist.

Secondly development of pieces. I know some moves are glaringly obvious. However there are often a lot of times when a pieces is just better placed on another square even if it doesn't particularly attack or defend anything on its new square. However even so it just needs to be moved to that new square.

Like for instace I analyse games on lichess sometimes, and it says that on some move (hypothetically) Q should have been moved from d7 to e7, even though it does nothing (as far as I see) special on e7 either.

I just don't know how to play these moves.