The Longest Forced Checkmate I've Ever Seen!

The answer is no , I did not click bait you .

This is actually checkmate in 130 moves for white .

It's white to play and win .

Despite the fact that black has 27 points worth of material .

You've got two rooks for 10 and the three pieces or nine and then eight ponds 27 points of material against the lone queen .

And it is still a forced checkmate for white , which by the way , stockfish doesn't see because it's too far out .

It's just so far that even stockfish at Max's depth and you let it sit and analyze for , we just can't see it .

100 and 30 moves is too long .

So shout out to Michael .

He also sent me another puzzle that I've used on this channel and he sent me this one as well .

This was the first time that I had seen it myself and I've got to say it's pretty fascinating .

I didn't realize that something like this could actually exist .

So if you're excited to get into this , let's get started , right .

So before I show you the solution , if you'd like to pause and think through , don't try to think through 100 and 30 moves .

But if you want to try to think through what's the idea behind how white can win from this position , just kind of the , the general plan going forward and then we can see if you're right as we go through the position .

All right .

So if you had a chance to do that , let's go ahead and talk about what's going on here .

First of all , even though Black has so many pieces , they're not ideally placed .

You can see this rook in the corner can't even move , right .

The knights are on the edge of the board , which is usually not great .

A lot of the ponds can't even move the bishop .

Ok ?

You might say that's a decent piece for black .

And then this rook is really uh doing a nice job and it's actually defending Black's king if you'll notice there's a couple of different threats here that white has .

This one is check made immediately .

So the rook kind of has to stay there and guard Black's king .

And that being said , uh how do we actually make progress as white ?

Well , the first move in this position is queen to D one check .

Now we're gonna notice a , a series of interesting queen checks here and obviously has to be queen checks , right ?

It's the only piece we have , but you're gonna see there's actually a point behind every move in this 130 move study .

So let's go ahead and take a look .

The Rook has to block only legal move .

We go back here and you might say , didn't we just repeat ?

No , no , no .

The queen was on D four and now it's on D three which is attacking the night .

Ok .

So we threw in that little check just so that we can pick off the night .

And again , Black has to continue to just kind of do the same deal .

OK ?

And here we go again .

And the reason we're going over here to D two and by the way , we're threatening checkmate .

So Black has to continue to , to block .

And if they block with the bishop , I should just mention that just loses immediately queen to C three .

And we're coming in here for the checkmate .

So that's not an option .

It has to be with the rip and now we go check on E one .

So we wanted to reposition the queen there so that we can go to E one because you can probably figure this one out again .

We're forking this the king of the night , right ?

And so we're basically eliminating the two nights .

OK .

Great .

So we've got those taken care of .

Now , let's continue again .

We go check again .

We come down here and we're doing this little dance because we want to get this position right here .

This is the only way that we could have gotten this position .

And now we play actually , before I tell you , if you'd like to pause , what move do we play here ?

And what's the idea behind this move ?

And this is kind of the , the key to this whole position .

Once you understand this idea , the rest of the solution actually makes a lot of sense .

Well , if you had a chance to look at that , the move that we're gonna play is queen to E four .

And this is what we call a waiting move .

We're putting black in Chung where they have to make a move that they don't want to make .

So let's , first of all , uh we're keeping the pin , which means the rook cannot move , the king could move here .

But then that's just checkmate immediately .

So that doesn't make sense .

The bishop can move .

But what you'll notice is that any bishop move is actually losing .

So let's just take a random one just to show the , the idea we come down with check , the rook has to block .

We come up here , we're threatening check again on D two .

So the rook has to block and we simply play check and checkmate .

All right .

So the , the bishop , when it was sitting there was guarding this square , that was the key thing that the bishop was doing .

And so anywhere else that we move the bishop to , it's going to lead to um a loss .

And also if you move it here , same exact thing is gonna happen , check , you come here threatening this check and checkmate .

Ok .

So that's kind of the idea beyond why black can't move the bishop .

So if you can't move the rook because it's stuck , you can't move the king because you get checkmated , you can't move the rook because it's pinned .

You can't move the bishop because you get checkmated .

The only thing left to move are the ponds .

And so that's what black does .

And now we have to do this crazy maneuver because we need our queen to be exactly here .

If our queen isn't exactly on the square when we do this , it's not gonna work out the same .

So what do we have to do ?

We have to do the same maneuver , check , check , check , check , check and then boom , we hit , hit him with Queenie four again .

Same kind of thing as blacks turn .

They don't really want to move , but they have to .

So they push up on and now you're gonna see a whole bunch of repeating , right ?

This is uh what is this ?

A 12345 , a six move sequence that we just repeat over and over again .

So the black keeps pushing the ponds .

Ok .

And we keep doing it and we keep doing it and we keep doing it and black has to keep on pushing the pawns .

All right , let's keep going .

I think you're getting the idea and this is really the key and this is why this study is so long , right ?

Why it's 100 and 30 move checkmate because of all these maneuvers with the pond moves .

And by the way , this might be a good time for me to mention the 50 move rule resets after a pawn is moved .

So there's no 50 move rule because the ponds are moving .

All right .

So here we go .

And we're gonna keep doing this until we take all of black's pawns .

We're on book 88 .

But if you're wondering , keep going , keep going almost there , almost there .

OK ?

My finger is getting a little bit tired .

I'm gonna keep , I'm gonna keep going .

All right .

Here we go .

We're getting to the end .

OK ?

Queen E four .

Here we go one more time and we finally take the queen .

Now we are on move 100 and 24 which means there's checkmate in six moves .

So now finally , if you would like , you can pause and actually try to calculate the winning idea from here .

All right .

If you had a chance to do that , there's a couple of ways you could do it , but the fastest is queen to H seven check .

And by the way , this was not a , a move that would have been possible before because there were all of the pawns in the way .

But since we've eliminated those , we can play queen H seven check , followed by queens E four yet again .

And if you remember that the last time we did this , black always would have to push a pawn .

Well , now there's no more pawn moves .

The rook is pinned .

The king doesn't want to move because of checkmate , which means black has to make a bishop move .

And you remember the bishop was guarding that crucial square .

So it doesn't matter wherever it moves to , we can deliver the checkmate .

We come down here to check the , the work has to block .

We come here a threatening checkmate here .

Black has to block and we simply go check checkmate because the bishop was no longer guarding it .

130 moves .

Checkmate white wins and it was all forced .

Wow .

Wow .

Um So uh I hopefully this is very helpful to you guys next time you're playing a game and you find yourself in this position .

I want you to remember this technique .

OK .

This is very crucial , very common technique .

I'm kidding .

But uh I hope you guys enjoyed that .

I had a lot of fun .

Thank you Michael again for sending it to me .

Fantastic position .

And um remember courses are on sale , 50% off .

That's the largest sale that I've ever done on my courses .

So make sure you take advantage of that .

But having said that stay sharp , play smart and take care .