Endgame · 寄せ
Closing in.
Yose, 寄せ, is the part of the game between breaking into the castle and the mate: the moves that take the king’s squares away one by one until a threat cannot be answered. It is where most games are won and lost, and it has its own techniques, most of them with names. Here are the ones that recur, each on a problem from the app’s library that the engine has proved has one answer.
The mate itself is the last move of the yose and the least important to read. The skill is the move before that, and the one before that: the quiet move that removes an escape square, the sacrifice that pulls the king onto the edge, the piece that gets out of its own way.
The problems below keep the tsume convention: every piece not on the board is in the defender’s hand, so a check that can be blocked will be. Each has been re-proved by the engine as this page was built: the line is legal, ends in mate, is the shortest, and no other first move works, except where a caption says otherwise.
Drive the king to the back rank 玉は下段に落とせ
A king on the edge has half as many squares as a king in the open, and the edge is where your golds work best. So the first job of a yose is to push the king down, and a check that leaves the king only a back-rank square is worth more than a check that wins material. Here the bishop check leaves one square, 6a, and the gold is waiting for it.
Step through the moves, or press play.
Tap a move to jump to it. Arrow keys work once the board has focus.
The sacrifice at the focal point 焦点の捨て駒
When two defenders guard the same square, a piece thrown onto that square has to be taken by one of them, and whichever takes it leaves its post. The square is the focal point, where the defenders’ lines meet. Here 1b is covered by both the king and the gold. The gold is dropped there and lost at once, and the gold that takes it can no longer guard 2a.
Step through the moves, or press play.
Tap a move to jump to it. Arrow keys work once the board has focus.
Remove your own obstructing piece 邪魔駒消去
Sometimes the piece in the way is yours. The bishop on 5a blocks the file the rook needs, and no quiet move fixes that in time. So the bishop leaves with check, gets captured, and the rook comes through the square it vacated. Trading a bishop for a silver looks terrible until you count the moves.
Step through the moves, or press play.
Tap a move to jump to it. Arrow keys work once the board has focus.
Wrap, do not chase 玉は包むように寄せよ
The most quoted yose proverb, and the most disobeyed. A check drives the king; a quiet move that takes away the squares it would run to keeps it where it is. The brinkmate page shows the standard example: a silver dropped a square away from the king, not a check, after which every reply loses. The two basic brinkmates there are both wrapping moves.
The named finishes
When the wrapping is done, the mate is one of a few shapes, and two of them are yose techniques as much as mating patterns. The dragon at one remove (一間竜): a dragon one square from the king on a line freezes anything dropped between them. The sending sacrifice (送りの手筋): a piece given next to the king that it must take, dragging it one square toward the dragon. Both are on the mating patterns page with problems of their own.
Three rules for the yose
- Keep the gold for the finish 金はとどめに残せ. The gold’s six-square move is the mating move in most mates. Spend silvers, knights and pawns on the preparation, and drop the gold last.
- Plain moves first 寄せは俗手で. In the yose the obvious move, the capture or the gold on the head, is usually right. Sacrifices are for when the plain move fails, and the problems above are what that looks like.
- Count before you check. A check that does not take a square away or bring a piece closer gives the defender a free king move. Every check in the three problems above does one or the other; that is what makes them problems and not games.
Close in yourself.
The app’s puzzles are mates and brinkmates from real games at your level, and the daily tsume is one of these problems a day.