Basic Smothered Mate

This course is the first of a series of content we'll add to the website to teach you some tips and tricks about bughouse. This first article will focus on a very common checkmate pattern: you should encounter it fairly often, so make sure to keep it in mind when you play this chess variant.

Smothered mate in a corner

The smothered mate is probably the most common mate pattern in bughouse. You will see it in many variations, but it looks like this:

This mate consists in attacking the opponent's king when it's surrounded by its own pieces. In this case, this works because the pawn on f7 is only protected by the rook and we deflect the rook by dropping our own rook on g8.

Since we can drop pieces anywhere on the board in bughouse, the above position could have been reached by dropping a knight to h6, which could easily have been a check, so you always have to be careful to not fall into this trap.

Example with Queen

A very frequent way to achieve this kind of smothered mate involves a queen and a double-check:

If the king tries to escape via f8, it's also mate:

Defense

It's good to know how to use this pattern to checkmate other players, but it's as important to know how to defend against this, so let's see a few ways to prevent this checkmate.

The first one is to have a piece protecting the g8 square so that it can capture the dropped rook and thus keep our own rook in f8 protecting the f7 pawn:

Another way is to protect twice the f7 pawn:

We can also drop a piece in front so that there's no pin anymore:

To defend against the queen and knight, you need to defend the f7 square, either by blocking the diagonal of the queen, or by defending the f7 square directly. If you have a rook on f8, it's better to exchange it for the knight (in bughouse, as we'll see in another course, knights and rooks have the same value anyway) than to get checkmated:

Yet another way to defend is to drop pieces on the square that would be used by the opponent, in this case, h6:

Dropping a bishop (instead of a pawn, for instance) also has the advantage of protecting g7: indeed, black could sacrifice the rook on g7 in some situations.

Another option is to move your king so that you do not have a pin anymore:

This way, if they still drop their knight on h6, you can either capture it (which can be risky is some situations), or protect your king since you're not in check.

As a last resort, you can push a pawn in front of your king to make an escape square:

This is usually risky as this creates holes in your defense that can be used by your opponent to attack you.

That was many ways to defend against the smothered mate. Stay tuned for new courses about bughouse tactics.