Scholar’s Mate

If you would like to score an easy victory in chess against someone who is unfamiliar with the game, and you are playing as white (a similar idea can be employed if you are playing as black, but it is, as in life away from the chessboard, more difficult), then you can make a simple sequence of four moves: pawn to e4, queen to h5, bishop to c4, queen to f 7. So long as your opponent responds with a cooperating move, and doesn’t bring their knights to the c6 or f6 squares or their queen to e7 (not as good a move, but it will do the trick), you will get a checkmate within four to seven moves. This is because at the start of the game, black’s pawn on f 7 is the weakest of the bunch (along with the corresponding pawn on f 2 for white), its only defender being the king, the board’s most vulnerable piece, the key to winning. Coordinate an attack on the f 7 pawn out the gate, win fast.

I was burned by this enough times when I first started my online chess hobby that I decided I should look it up and be prepared the next time it came my way. It’s called “the scholar’s mate,” so named by Francis Beale in The Royall Game of Chesse-Play, published in London in 1656, an adaptation of the work of Gioachino Greco, an Italian player considered the strongest of his time. Modern use of the word scholar—a person who has studied their subject matter to the level of mastery—would suggest this is an advanced tactic. But usage of the seventeenth­century term (spelled scholler) is in line with the other definition (which is still in use at times): a student. The other names the move goes by give the game away: in Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, it’s “the children’s mate”; in Norwegian, Serbian, Danish, and Swedish, it’s “the school mate”; in Czech, German, Hebrew, and Polish, it’s “the shoemaker’s mate”; in Italian, it’s “the barber’s mate”; in French, Portuguese, Turkish, and Spanish, it’s “the shepherd’s mate.”