Alexander Alekhine's Incredible Queen Sacrifice!
Hello Chess Players! This is my second blog on Chess.com! just to tell you guys who I am, I am a 13-year-old who is frequently active on Chess.com. Enough talking, let's get to the fun! Today I will be talking about a phenomenal queen sacrifice executed by Alexander Alekhine! The queen sacrifice was in a game played by 2 incredible players, Alexander Alekhine and Friedrich Koehlnlein on June 6th, 1908. The game was only 17 moves, and on the 16th move, Alekhine sacrificed the queen! Koehnlein resigned 1 move after the sacrifice. The game went like this:
In this position, Alekhine was white, and Koehnlein just made the move Qh5 threatening a double attack on the white knight on f3. After that, Alekhine purposefully captured the black knight on e5 leaving the white bishop unguarded. On the next move, his opponent captured the white bishop since it was free. After the bishop was captured, Alekhine took the advantage to check the king from moving the white bishop from d3 to c4. Then the king had to move to g8. This next move was the incredible queen sacrifice. The queen captured the black bishop on d6 leaving the rook diagonal to the queen vulnerable to capture. Let's cover what would happen if Koehlnein wouldn't have resigned. So if the pawn took the queen on d6, then the white knight would jump onto the square f7 checking the king and attacking the queen. Usually, most of us try to save our queen in any way possible, and I assume that Koehnlein would've taken with the rook, but if he did, the inactive white rook on e1 would swoop down to e8 giving check, the only move for black would be to move the black rook that just captured the white knight down to f8 with no one guarding it, and the next move would be checkmate with the white rook capturing the black rook on f8.
Alekhine's opponent, Koehnlein was a German chess master and a politician, and at that time, Alekhine was only 16 years old! From that time he was an incredible player and was considered one of the strongest players in the world when he was 22. Such an amazing Chess Grandmaster! Don't you think so?
I hope you enjoyed this blog, please give me some feedback so I can improve my future posts! See you next time!
(Chesskid King pushing Queen image link:
https://media.chesskidfiles.com/images/user/videos/1371_b458c.png)
