Checkmate

Checkmate (often shortened to mate) is a game position in chess in which a player's king is in check (threatened with capture) and there is no way to remove the threat. Checkmating the opponent wins the game.

In chess the king is never actually captured – the game ends as soon as the king is checkmated. In master and serious amateur play, most players resign an inevitably lost game before being checkmated, and it is considered bad etiquette to continue playing in a completely hopeless position.

If a player is not in check but has no legal move, then it is stalemate, and the game immediately ends in a draw. A checkmating move is recorded in algebraic notation using the hash symbol (#) – for example, 34.Qh8#.

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.

The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Farsi phrase "shāh māt" (شاه مات) which means, literally, "the King is helpless". Persian "māt" applies to the king but in Sanskrit "māta", also pronounced "māt", applied to his kingdom "traversed, measured across, and meted out" thoroughly by his opponent; "māta" is the past participle of "mā" verbal root. Others maintain that it means "the King is dead", as chess reached Europe via the Islamic world, and Arabic māta (مَاتَ) means "died" or "is dead". However, in Pashto (an Iranic language), the word māt (مات) still exists, meaning "destroyed, broken".

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