Mate in 4

Mate in 4 is a puzzle where four moves of your own force checkmate. What sets it apart from mate in 3 is that the opponent gets to reply three times in between. You move, the opponent answers, you move again, the opponent answers again, you move a third time, the opponent answers once more, and your fourth move mates. The tree runs another layer deeper, so almost none of these can be solved on sight and you have to calculate to the end.

How to find a mate in 4

The principle is the same as mate in 3, but this time you have to chain three forcing moves back to back. The first move forces, the move after the reply forces again, the third move forces again, and only then does the fourth move mate with no gap for the opponent to slip through. The deeper the calculation, the more fatal a non-forcing move becomes. If one move in the middle is not forcing, the opponent has that much more room to defend over the three moves still to come.

That is why a mate in 4 is usually a chain of forcing moves - checks, captures, threats. King hunts are especially common: if each check leaves the king exactly one square to run to, you can keep driving it, one square per move, and the chain stays forcing four moves deep.

Below is a position from our own puzzles (White to move). There is a mate in 4.

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KingKey piece

The black king is on f8, screened by the bishop on g7 and the pawn on f7. White uses the lone queen on h7 to strip that screen away and go after the king. There is no immediate mate, but a string of checks pushes the king one square at a time until it runs out of squares.

The first move is Qxg7+, taking the bishop that shields the king and giving check.

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Qxg7+ is a check, so Black has to answer, and the only legal move here is Ke8. The king cannot take the queen with Kxg7 because the f6 pawn guards it. The e7 square is covered by White's f6 pawn and g8 by the queen, so the king can only step aside to e8.

The queen follows the king. Qg8+.

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The queen checks the king on e8 again along the 8th rank. The queen sweeps that rank to cover d8 and f8, and the f6 pawn covers e7, so Black has to go down to Kd7. The king is dragged out into the open.

Now the queen takes the f7 pawn with another check. Qxf7+.

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The queen takes on f7 and checks the king on d7 a third time. The only square the king can reach is Kd8. Three checks have walked the king all the way from f8 to d8.

The last move mates. Qe7#.

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Qxg7+ Ke8 Qg8+ Kd7 Qxf7+ Kd8 Qe7#. A single queen gives three checks to walk the king from f8 to d8, and the fourth move finishes it. Follow the king to see why it takes four moves. After each of the first three checks it still had one square to flee to, so it walked from f8 to d8 before it was trapped. On d8 its own rook blocks c8, and the f6 pawn guards the queen on e7, so every escape square is gone.

If the forcing chain breaks, the calculation collapses

All four White moves here were checks, and each time Black had exactly one reply. Because the forcing moves were chained without a break, the tree never branched, and that is why it could be read all the way to move four.

Play a non-checking move somewhere in the middle and Black gets the chance to open an escape square for the king or add a defender with the queen or a rook. The more moves remain, the more that one free tempo is worth to the defender. That is why keeping the forcing chain unbroken matters even more in a mate in 4 than in a mate in 3.

What our data says about mate in 4

Our puzzle database has 1,378 problems tagged as Mate in 4 (counted July 2026), less than a fifth of Mate in 3 (7,359). Requiring one more forced move cuts the count sharply.

The difficulty tilts clearly toward the advanced range. Only 4% sit below rating 1200 (Mate in 3 is 32%), while 49% are rated 1900 or above (Mate in 3 is 20%).

The sacrifice tag co-occurs at 53.6%, higher even than Mate in 3 (44.3%), and attraction (dragging the king onto the square you want) shows up 31.1% of the time (Mate in 3 is 15.6%). The deeper the calculation, the more often a move that forces off a defender or drags the king is needed. The example above is a pure king hunt, but more than half of mate-in-4 puzzles include a move that gives up material somewhere.

For scale, the same query method counts mateIn2 at 25,089, mateIn1 at 23,166, mateIn3 at 7,359, mateIn4 at 1,378 and mateIn5 at 294 (the mate umbrella tag covers 57,285). Mate in 4 is among the smallest of the mate categories that fix a move count.

On the defending side

• Count the opponent's consecutive forcing moves to the end. If three checks can be chained near your king, that can be the start of a mate in 4. Blocking one or two checks and relaxing is not enough.
• Look ahead to where a king hunt ends. When a string of checks pushes the king one square at a time, work out where it gets trapped last. It is especially dangerous when one of your own pieces is blocking an escape square.
• Make a luft in advance. As with mate in 3, the forced sequence works when the king is boxed to a single square. Push a pawn to give it room, and the long string of checks often breaks somewhere in the middle.

Further reading

• Lichess, puzzle theme Mate in 4 (the source of this site's puzzle tag). https://lichess.org/training/themes
• Statistics produced by scripts/analyze-mate-in-four-stats.mjs; the run is recorded in docs/data/mate-in-four-stats.md.

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Related: Mate in 3 · Mate in 2 · All tactics