A deep knight sacrifice as only move
In the second round of this standard tournament, I got a winning position against a strong player, but the only move to win was a knight sacrifice that is quite hard to calculate. I was low on time already, and though I saw the sacrifice, I couldn't find all the moves and played an inferior knight retreat instead.
Can you calculate this combination?
Try it on the interactive puzzle below:
(Warning: This will likely take a few minutes, as the combination is quite long and subtle.)
Here's the complete game with annotations:
I was not only low on time, but a bit aggravated about my opponent's clock use, as he made all moves almost instantly. Note that we played the 90m/40 + 30m + 30s increment system. Thanks to the 30 second increment, at move 10 he had more time on the clock than at the beginning of the game, and he ended the game with 1 hour and 29 minutes remaining. He didn't seem to think about his moves at all through the whole game as critical variations were all over the place. Well, to each his own.
My clock use was on the other extreme, but I can't see where I could have used much less time, the knight sacrifice would have given me a winning position that I could have blitzed to victory. Still, a game is a game and I don't hold a grudge against it or my opponent. I learned some lessons and look forward to the rest of the tournament.
