We’re now starting the sixth week of chess summer school with an example from one of my chess students who reached this position on the ICC a few days ago. I always tell my students to look at all checks and captures. She saw a capture that would work, Nxc2, but missed that there was a mate in four in the position. All four moves were checks. You can’t just see the first check. You have to follow the whole series of checks one right after the other. That’s what we’re going to do for a while: look at a lot of checks leading to mate.

- Solution: Black can mate with 1...Na2+ 2.Kd2 Bb4+ 3.Nc3 Bxc3+ 4.bxc3 Qxc3# If I had to pick a reason why Black didn’t see the mate, it would be forgetting the bishop on e7. You have to try to see how all your pieces can get into the attack.

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