At first this position might seem a curious candidate for one of our mates; where are White’s bishops? Both are off the board. But White does have a queen ready to join a mating attack, and he has a rook ready to blast open g7 plus another rook ready to take the first rook’s place on the g-file. These are plenty of clues to suggest a line of experimentation: 1. Rxg7+, Kxg7; Black can't turn down the offer of White's rook by moving his king to h8, because then White has Qh6 and mates a move later, the guard of h6 having just been obliterated. All right; so the king has been moved to g7, and its pawn cover has been breached. Now remember that you need to arrange diagonal pressure as well as vertical pressure against the king’s position—and the only piece you have for the first purpose is your queen. Work with checks to arrange it. 2. Qg5+, Kh8; 3. Qf6+ works nicely; White’s queen is doing the same work normally accomplished by the king’s bishop in Morphy’s mate. Black moves his king back to g8, and now White mates with 1. Ra1-g1+, Qg3; RxQ#.

A first lesson of this position is the importance of being flexible in working with these mating patterns. If you have some but not all of the ingredients you ordinarily would require, try improvising with substitute pieces and substitute sources of pressure. If you have a way to tear open the pawn cover in front of the enemy king, think about all resources you have available to follow up. Whether the result counts as an instance of Morphy’s mate is neither here nor there. What matters is whether it works. A most valuable payoff of knowing mating patterns is that they make familiar various arrangements of pressure against the enemy king that can be created in any number of ways.

A second lesson is the special importance of all this flexibility when your queen is available. Bishops and rooks can exert diagonal and vertical pressure respectively; a queen can do both, and this position, like another we saw a few moments ago, shows off its versatility. First it functions like a rook, putting pressure down the g-file to drive the king into the corner; then it turns into a bishop, cornering the king on h8.

A final point of the position is the value of connected rooks. The most intuitive way rooks can be connected is by putting them in a battery on the same file. But even when they are set up on the back rank they can be connected in the way they are here: there is nothing between them, so one can plunge forward and the other one can then take its place. It’s easy to overlook a rook positioned like the one on a1 here. Don’t do it.