Capture is not needed!
The well-known wisdom of a children's coach says: chess is not draughts, so it is not necessary to capture. It seems we should take back an equal amount of material if our partner takes our pieces. But sometimes this is not true and you can evade taking at any moment, if it is profitable. People often forget that it is important not what was on the board, but what is located on it now. Let us illustrate it by a small educational example:
Studying numerous more complex examples, we can distinguish two large types of the rule "Capture is not needed." In the first case, we are talking about total refusing to take, and realization some alternative ideas. In the second one we create other threats and we hold the capture of the opponent's figure as a possibility. In this case, we often can see an intermediate move. The first case is clearly illustrated in the famous game:
As we can see from this example, black completely refused to take on h6, proposed by white. According to this game we understand that the idea of "do not take" is not obvious to one or both partners and it is a sort of a trap. The second example is the little-known game of the Latvian grandmaster Vladimir Petrov against Aleksander Macht.
One more example from the Pilavov-Zubarev game
There are some tasks:
Training position:
One of the most beautiful combinations from the Hoffman-Petrov game, the white clearly did not expect the next move of the black:
