How to Checkmate with the King & Rook
How to Checkmate with the King & Rook
The King & rook checkmate, or as I personally call it, “The Spartan Checkmate” for its ability for checkmate with the absolute bare essentials, just 2 of your final chess pieces. Being able to checkmate with the Rook & the King may sound easy, but it can very tricky avoiding the stalemate.
Once you learn how to checkmate with the King & Rook in chess, the rook & knight checkmate, and rook & bishop checkmate become much more simple, as the knight and bishop will now only be extra chess pieces for your arsenal.
Now, lets get down to the good stuff:
How to Checkmate with the King & Rook
Like with most checkmates, the goal here is to get your opponent’s King into the corner of the chessboard and force them into a trap for checkmate.
For this example, we’ll be focusing on checkmating the King in the upper right corner of the chessboard (h8), but you can checkmate the King in any corner of the board. (It is not always necessary to get your opponent’s King in the corner though. So long as they are trapped along the last row either horizontally or vertically you can set up checkmate.)
Watch a video of a checkmate with the King, Ring, & Bishop. While the bishop is present, the checkmate was mostly accomplished with just the King & Rook.
In the photo below, we have already begun to trap our opponent’s King, by placing our rook on b7, ensuring our opponent’s King can now only move horizontally across row 8. 
In this position, you would hold the rook in place and begin moving your opponent’s King down the chessboard with your own King.
Once the King has no where else to move, you place your rook on row 8, placing the King in check with your Rook, and ensuring the King has no where to move with your own King guarding all possible escapes, resulting in checkmate.
You can see 2 examples of this below: 
