Mate in 5+
Mate in 5 is a puzzle where it takes five or more of your moves to force checkmate. It runs at least one layer deeper than mate in 4: even in the shortest case your first move is answered, so are your second, third, and fourth, and only the fifth move delivers mate. With four or more opponent replies interleaved, you almost never spot the answer at a glance. It is the deepest mate class this site tags, and the rarest of the classes that fix a move count.
How to find a mate in 5
The principle is the same as for shorter mates: you must chain forcing moves, this time four times in a row. The first move must force, your move after the reply must force, and so must the third and fourth, so that the opponent has no escape all the way to the fifth-move mate. The deeper you calculate, the more costly a non-forcing move becomes: with so many moves left, one loose move gives the defender far more room to answer.
That is why mate-in-5 lines are built mostly from checks, captures, and piece sacrifices. A very common shape strips away a piece sheltering the enemy king, then gives up material to drag the king onto the square you want and chases it with checks. The example below is exactly that shape.
Here is a position from this site's puzzles (White to move). There is a mate in 5.
The black king is boxed in the h8 corner, and the g8-bishop in front of it leaves few escape squares. White has no immediate mate on h8, but forcing moves that peel away the king's shelter will leave it with nowhere to go. The e7-knight controls both g8 and g6 at once.
The first move is Rxg8+, taking the bishop that shields the king, with check.
Rxg8+ is check. The king would like to take the rook on g8, but the e7-knight defends it, so Kxg8 is not allowed. The only legal move is Kh7.
Now White sacrifices the rook: Rh8+.
The rook moves to h8 and checks the king again. No white piece defends the h8-rook, yet the king still has to capture it, because every other square is covered or occupied by its own pawns. Giving up the rook with Rh8+ is the point of the puzzle: one rook is spent to pull the king back into the h8 corner and clear the eighth rank for the queen.
Qe8+. The queen swings onto the eighth rank with check.
The queen checks the h8 king along the eighth rank from e8. Black has two replies, and both lose. Kh7 runs straight into Qg8#, so Black plays Rf8, pulling the f6-rook back to block the check. It blocks, but the rook is taken on the very next move.
Qxf8+. The queen takes the blocking rook, with check again.
The queen takes the f8-rook and checks the king again. The king must retreat with Kh7. It cannot go to g8, which the queen controls from right beside it on f8.
The last move is mate: Qg8#.
Rxg8+ Kh7 Rh8+ Kxh8 Qe8+ Rf8 Qxf8+ Kh7 Qg8#. White gives up a rook and chains queen checks to finish in five moves. Qg8# is mate because of the e7-knight. That single knight does two jobs at once: it guards the queen on g8 so the king cannot play Kxg8, and it controls the king's last flight square, g6. The remaining squares g7 and h6 are blocked by Black's own pawns, so the king can neither move nor capture. The rook sacrifice and the queen checks all serve to drive the king into the net this knight covers.
A forcing chain built on a sacrifice
Here White gave up the rook first (Rh8+ Kxh8). It is a material loss in the moment, but in return it trapped the king in the h8 corner and opened the queen's road onto the eighth rank. Through the three queen checks that followed (the last of them mate), Black's reply was almost always the only legal move. The forcing chain never broke, so the branches never multiplied, and the whole line was readable five moves deep.
This is why sacrifices show up so often in deep mates. Giving up a piece usually comes with a check or a direct threat, which forces the opponent's replies down to one. The more moves remain, as in mate in 5, the more that forcing power matters. Judge such a move by how many replies it leaves the opponent rather than by the material it costs.
Mate in 5 by our numbers
This site's puzzle DB tags 294 puzzles as mate in 5 (measured July 2026). That is about a fifth of mate in 4 (1,378) and a little over one percent of mate in 2 (25,089). The count keeps falling sharply with each extra move of depth.
The difficulty is skewed high, too. Only 10% of these puzzles are rated under 1600, while 33% are rated 2200 or above.
56.5% also carry the sacrifice tag, so more than half of all mate-in-5 puzzles give up material somewhere, as the rook sacrifice above does. Attraction (dragging the king onto a specific square) appears in 38.4% of them. The deeper the calculation, the more often the line needs a move that forcibly removes a defender or pulls the king in, rather than a pure king march.
For reference, the same query 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). Among the mate tags that fix a move count, mate in 5 is the smallest.
For the defender
- Count the opponent's forcing moves all the way out. If checks can be strung together four times around your king, that may be the start of a mate in 5. Blocking one or two checks is no reason to relax.
- Watch especially for checks that come with a sacrifice. When the opponent gives up material to check you, work out whether that loss leads to mate a few moves later. Over half of mate-in-5 puzzles involve a sacrifice somewhere in the line.
- Make luft in advance. A long forcing line usually depends on the king having a single move each time. Pushing a pawn to open a breathing square can break a chain of checks midway.
References
- Lichess, puzzle theme Mate in 5 (the source of this site's puzzle tags). https://lichess.org/training/themes
- Example position: Lichess puzzle
1GsHc(CC0). https://lichess.org/training/1GsHc - Statistics:
scripts/analyze-mate-in-five-stats.mjs, results recorded indocs/data/mate-in-five-stats.md.
Start training: Mate in 5 training
Related: Mate in 4 · Mate in 3 · All tactics