Give Your King Some Air

You castled, you left your pawns at home, and one rook check later the game was over. Again. A single pawn move would have saved you. Learn the pattern from the attacking side and you start to feel the danger in your own games. 100 back-rank mates, rated 800-1099.

That pawn move has a name: luft, a little air for the king. One empty square for the king and the back-rank trick stops working. This book trains the pattern from the other side of the board. You play the attacker, you find the rook or queen that lands on the last rank, and after enough of them the shape of a sealed-in king becomes hard to miss.

Back rank again? Back rank again. Nobody here is promising you will never get caught again. The idea is simpler: see the pattern so many times that it stops being a surprise.

Inside are 100 back-rank puzzles taken from real online games, rated 800-1099 on the standard online puzzle scale. Most are mates in two and a few finish in a single move; the caption under each diagram tells you who moves and how many moves the mate takes. They run from easiest to hardest in three stages - Warm-Up, Steady and Challenge - so the early ones build the picture and the later ones test it.

The puzzles are mixed on purpose: two in a row never start with the same kind of piece (rooks and queens count as one), so you solve each one by reading the board, not by repeating the last answer.

Every position has been checked by exhaustive search and confirmed again by a chess engine to have exactly one first move that forces mate. Puzzles with a second solution were thrown out, so there is no guesswork.

A short hint sits under each diagram for when you need a nudge, and the answer waits on the very next screen with a short explanation of why the mate works. When the mate takes two moves, the answer lists every defence your opponent can try, not just one main line, so you see how each escape gets closed.

Built as a fixed-layout ebook for Kindle, phone and tablet: one puzzle fills the screen, and you tap through to the answer.

Meeting the pattern for the first time, or rated below 800? Start with Caught on the Back Rank Again?, the 400-799 set in the same series.