Double toast checkmate

The double toast checkmate is an advacned version of the smothered cannon checkmate. When the opponents have two connected elephants, it is hard to exploit the weakness with a single cannon. Nevertheless, with the help of two cannons, we can tear the defence and perform a double toast checkmate.

Let’s look at the example below:

In this position, black has one more soldier, and two more elephants. Besides, the combination of a horse and a cannon is much better than a combination of two cannons in endgames in xiangqi, making black to have a significant advantage here.

The two cannons are generally considered less powerful than a horse and a cannon, because the former only has a few checkmate patterns, making it easy to defend against. The double toast checkmate is one of checkmate that can be performed by two cannons.

Back to the position, black moves the soldier to F3 to attack the cannon previously. If the red player is not familiar with the double toast checkmate, then most likely he will just move away the cannon. Fortunately, the red player spots the opportunity and sacrifice the E3 cannon for the J3 elephant!

The only way for black to deal with the check is to capture the cannon with the H5 elephant. Now, the J3 elephant is undefended, and red can perform a smothered cannon checkmate by using C3 cannon to capture the J3 elephant. Red wins.

In this Xiangqi tutorial, we talked about the double toast cannon checkmate. Learning this checkmate pattern not only gives you one more weapon in your arsenal, but also prevents you from being checkmated by your opponent with the sneaky double toast checkmate.

Below is an exercise about the double toast checkmate. Try out the puzzle to see whether you can apply what you learn in this tutorial!

Practice makes perfect