Four Queens: Checkmate or Bust

A trip to Maryland and the difference between quad queens on the board and on the felt

Me at the PokerStars Open at Maryland Live! Photo Rachel Kay Winter/PokerStars

At the PokerStars Open in Maryland, I was particularly stoked to play in the Women’s Event. Several friends were in town just for the tournament, and two had already won Open events, giving celebratory vibes, and a brunch of champions.

Maryland Open high roller champion Denise Allen hosted a ladies brunch

Midway through the tournament, I got into a classic poker confrontation with fellow Team PokerStars Pro, the hilarious Caitlin Comeskey . She re-raised me preflop, and I went all in. The cards on their backs revealed a classic race: pocket queens for Caitlin, and ace-king for me. The normally fair fight turned into overkill when she caught two more queens.

Caitlin has four queens

But what’s just as rare as quad queens in poker? Four queens in chess. Not the queens from a scholastic tournament where someone promotes four queens before checkmating. I’m talking about the wild, albeit rare endgames in which both sides have two queens each. Two patterns crop up again and again in such endings.

1. Checkmates in which a queen is pinned by another queen.

2. Skewers

Let’s dig into some examples:

Fourth World Chess Champion Alexander Alekhine had a pretty checkmate featuring the unusual material configuration in this Paris 1913 game against Edward Lasker.

Black to Move and Mate in Two

White’s king seems tucked away. Can you find the mate in two (answer in footnotes¹)?

Alekhine prevailed in another four queens battle from his 1927 World Championship match against Jose Raúl Capablanca— a very entertaining game played in the 11th round. Coincidentally, just as I was searching my database for four queen positions, I received a beautiful new book, Capablanca-Alekhine by Luis Fernández Siles, which covers this game too: cosmic!

Black to Move and Mate in 3

This time it’s Black to mate in three².

Can you see the common pattern between the two Alekhine mates?

With so much firepower on the board, the side with the move in a four queens battle often wins.

Take this position, in which White is winning in a number of ways.

Pilnick-Luckis, Mar Del Plata 1948, White to Win in the prettiest way

The win chosen is the loveliest—and the most thematic: 1. Qh5+! Kxh5 2. Qxh7+ with a skewer on the g-file coming to pick up the remaining black queen.

The skewer motif comes up often in queen-heavy positions, like this 2024 speed chess championship battle between Magnus Carlsen and Alireza Firouzja. It was called by beloved Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky (1995-2025), alongside IM Levy Rozman. Danya was truly one of a kind, and clips like this, of which there are so many, remind us how lucky we were to have him—albeit for too short a time.

Daniel Naroditsky, 1995-2025

Four queen positions are reminders that too much of a good thing can be real. When talents overlap, as in two chess queens, it isn’t exactly “double the queen power.” because the queens often control the same squares. Rather than doubling in power, the second queen reduces the value of the original.

A more common version of this principle arises in endgames with two rooks vs a rook and a minor piece. The side with two rooks wants to trade one pair of rooks, so their opponent ends up rookless and we can attack pawns and ranks more easily.

But while rook endgames may be the ones we see most, the rare birds, like four chess queens, can teach us unforgettable lessons.

Next up for me is the North American Poker Tour in Las Vegas, from November 3-12. I hope to see some of you there, ideally not making quads against me.

1. 1…Qc3+ 2. Qb3 Qexb4#

2. 1…Qg1+ 2. Kh3 Qd-f1# 3. Qg2 Qh1#