Scholar's mate Bibliography Scholar's mate In chess, Scholar's Mate is the checkmate achieved by the following moves, or similar: The same mating pattern may be reached by various move orders. For example, White might play 2.Qh5, or Black might play 2...Bc5. In all variations, the basic idea is the same: the queen and bishop combine in a simple mating attack on f7 (or f2 if Black is performing the mate). Scholar's Mate is sometimes referred to as the "Four-Move Checkmate", although there are other ways to checkmate in four moves. Unlike Fool's Mate, which rarely occurs at any level, games ending in
Null move Null move In game theory, a null move or pass is a decision by a player to not make a move when it is that player's turn to move. Even though null moves are against the rules of many games, they are often useful to consider when analyzing these games. Examples of this include the analysis of zugzwang (a situation in chess or other games in which a null move, if it were allowed, would be better than any other move), and the null-move heuristic in game tree analysis (a method of pruning game trees involving making a null move