
Generating An Attack#3 - Tal Flummoxes Botvinnik With A Foolhardy Knight Sacrifice!
- When you sacrifice a piece, your opponent has too perform deep calculation, otherwise they might miss something. This will return you your time that you invested in the sacrifice in the first place.
- Your opponent will be baffled much of the time, so they might not be able to think clearly, so you get a sort of psychological advantage
- You are often given great attacking oppurtunities.
Here is the game between Tal and Botvinnik, which contributed to Tal snatching the World crown from Botvinnik, in 1960:
I won`t do any analysis up until the moment of sacrifice, because I am not an expert on the KID, and I want to give my undivided attention to methods of 'Generating An Attack'. These methods arose out of the chaos caused by Tal`s sacrifice.
First of all, here is a picture of the match (Tal on the left):
The way out of the deep dark forest, which Botvinnik missed in his calcualtions, involving 25.Bxf3, and reasons why 25.Qxf3 is not playable.
I hope you have found some of these positions interesting! This article is very content heavy, so I don`t expect you to have gone through it all, in fact I believe that this type of article is one that you should go back to, for reference, more than reading through all in one go - but you are welcome to read it all in one go for the hell of it if you want to.
My main point that I want you to understand, is that in certain positions, you can play abnormal moves, often sacrifices, in order to discombobulate your opponent like Tal. You might say 'that is all very well for blitz and bullet, but..' and I would argue immediately, that the focus of this article was a world championship match, and the time control was something like 90/30. This kind of sacrifice can be wholly sound, if you use your time to calculate it thoroughly enough. the ma However. I believe that the main reason why Botvinnik lost, was that the problematic nature of the sacrifice caused him to spend so much time, that he was left with not enough time to find the best moves when he was in some of the most tactical positions.
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