Here we use our rook to force their king to come out underneath his own rook, which is then unable to block our queen’s check. A nearby queen can often deliver this checkmate if the king is blocked by pawns as well. Note that here their rook cannot recapture our rook because it is pinned, so the king must recapture our rook.
Often we don’t win with a checkmate itself, but because the threat of checkmate means our opponent is powerless to stop us from capturing their pieces. Here the queen is too busy guarding against our rook checkmate and is not able to guard their rook. We say that the queen is ‘overloaded’.
If we have extra pieces to help our Queen, it may be a strong move to sacrifice a piece if the K will be exposed afterwards. But make sure you have a good follow-up to your sacrifice or you may just lose your piece for nothing! Here we sacrifice our rook with Rxh7!! and afterwards Qxf7 will be a check. If they block with their bishop the h file is now open and the rook next to our king will come across and finish the checkmate.
This is a common checkmate pattern whenever we control the diagonal leading in to our opponent’s castled king. If we can get a rook or a queen into the corner square then it will be checkmate. Here we can sacrifice our queen to get our rook into the corner square.
