Boden's Mate
A checkmate delivered by two bishops on crossing diagonals, typically after the enemy king has castled and its own pieces block escape squares.
Boden's Mate usually follows a combination that opens both diagonals at once, often including a sacrifice to clear the way, so the king finds itself boxed in by its own pawns or pieces with no flight square.
Etymology
This mate is named after a nineteenth-century English master, and Wikipedia is unusually careful about the attribution. It states that the mate is named for Samuel Boden, who played a famous early example of it in Schulder-Boden, London 1853, and then immediately qualifies the credit by noting that it had been known previously from the game Horwitz-Popert, Hamburg 1844. Wikipedia's biography identifies him as Samuel Standidge Boden, an English professional chess master, born 4 May 1826 in East Retford, Nottinghamshire and died 13 January 1882 in Bedford Square, London. The pattern itself uses two bishops on criss-crossing diagonals against a king, usually one that has castled queenside on c8 or c1, whose flight squares are blocked by its own pieces, and it is frequently set up by a queen sacrifice on c3 or c6. Wikipedia adds that it is usually a pure mate and lists further examples including Canal-NN, Budapest 1934, the so-called Peruvian Immortal, Alekhine-Vasic, Banja Luka 1931, and Zukertort-Anderssen, Breslau 1865.
First documented: 1853 for the game that gave the mate its name; 1844 for the earlier known occurrence — Schulder-Boden, London 1853, with Horwitz-Popert, Hamburg 1844 cited by Wikipedia as an earlier instance of the same pattern
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.