Mate in 24 moves or fewer · You play white
ProTwo bishops side by side form a wall of diagonals no king can cross. Push the enemy king to the edge, then into a corner, and mate with the bishops on adjacent diagonals while your king takes away the escape squares.
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Two bishops mate a bare king, but it comes up rarely enough that most club players have never finished one. The black king stands on e5; your king is on e1 with the bishops still on c1 and f1. Twenty-four moves, which sounds like plenty until you try it without a method.
Side by side in the centre, say on d3 and e3, the bishops control two neighbouring diagonals each and leave a fence of squares the black king cannot touch. On their own they cannot move the fence forward, because the moment one bishop steps away the gap opens; your king closes it from behind. So the first moves belong to the king, and only then does the wall advance.
Driving the king to an edge is the easy half; the corner is the hard half. A king on the edge slides along it, and you take the squares ahead of it one by one while your king shadows it from two squares away. The final picture: your king two squares from the corner, one bishop checking, the other covering the last flight square. The costly faults are letting the king out through a gap while you reposition a bishop, and checking when a check gains nothing. Stalemate is a danger only in the corner.
Take White. Spend the first few moves on your king, then bring the bishops up to stand beside each other on the third or fourth rank. If the black king's squares do not shrink after a move, you moved the wrong piece. Mate inside twenty-four moves is the pass.
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