The king sacrifice: Top 3 chess illegal moves played by grandmasters
In chess, there are many rules. First, we learn how pieces move, then checks and checkmates, and afterward special rules like en passant, castling, and double pawn move. Interestingly, if beginners make illegal moves very often, Grandmasters still make them in official tournaments. Some of them were made accidentally, but others turned out to be a major scandal.
Today we will take a look at the funniest and most interesting illegal moves played by elite chess players!
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And he sacrifices... the game.
GothamChess
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Top 3 Illegal moves in chess
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One of the most common rules in OTB tournaments is that if you move a piece and stop touching it, you have finished your move and cannot change it. I had a lot of sad stories with this "touch rule" myself, but in such important tournaments, this is even worse.
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In this position, Magnus Carlsen played against Alexandra Kosteniuk in 2009. It is the World Blitz Championship, so every point matters here. Their clocks are ticking and time starts to go low. White does have a solid position and some advantage but black is preparing a breakthrough on the queenside that you need to defend carefully.
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Magnus has two options: kick away black's queen by playing bishop to d2 or gain positional advantage and play rook to e3. But there is also a third move that would actually be winning for white: Rook to e2. This move has the same plans as Rook to e3, except now black can't pin white's rook and exchange queens, which is critical in this position. So, what move did Magnus play?
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As you can see in slow-motion, Magnus takes one of his rooks and moves it to e2, and after seeing his blunder, he decides - "Never mind" and moves his other rook to e2 instead. Of course, this mistake cost him the entire game and a lot of Elo points. A truly hilarious and sad moment at the same time, demonstrating that sometimes you have to think a little bit before making a move, even if you are running tight on the clock.
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In chess, there are two ways to promote a chess piece: the first one is to push the pawn to the last rank and replace it with a piece you want to promote, or remove the pawn from the board and put a piece on the last rank. The second option is the fastest, so most Grandmasters use this method to promote in blitz games, but sometimes putting a pawn on the last rank messes with their brain, and they forget to put a piece instead of a pawn.
In this situation Hikaru Nakamura blundered, and now black could just promote their pawn and win, but this is where it gets tragic: it doesn't matter what way you promote your pawn, only one thing matters: you cannot hit the clock before finishing your promotion. And this is where illegal move came from:
As you can see from the video, while Caruana was getting his queen, he accidentally dropped it and hit the clock with his elbow, counting it as an illegal move, even though Caruana didn't mean to touch the clock. One of the unluckiest moments in chess! And this is not the single time grandmasters hit the clock in the middle of promoting: the same situation happened in the game Topalov vs. Kasparov. Even the greatest chess players sometimes make mistakes!
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In a battle of two Grandmasters, Vidit Santosh vs. Hikaru Nakamura, they ended up in a drawish rook endgame. The position has some chances for black, but white has enough time to stop them. So what could possibly go wrong?
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Imagine playing a position like this as white against Hikaru Nakamura. Black has a very dangerous pawn, but how do you stop it? You start running low on the clock with only a few seconds left to spare. You know the position is very drawish, but one wrong move may cost you the whole game...
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Hikaru manages to make a brilliant move with only 10 seconds on the clock, almost as if his sacrifice was planned before the game! Vidit realizes that the pawn endgame is lost, but instead of resigning, he plays a move in chess never seen before on a Grandmaster level, a move that will be remembered in chess history forever:
That's right, not only did Vidit manage to sacrifice his king, but he also broke the second rule: kings cannot touch each other in chess. It seems like Vidit wanted to play King to e2, but accidentally chose the wrong square and broke two chess rules. The funny thing is, the position is still losing for white after King to c3, and it doesn't matter if the king is on e3 or on e2:
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This game became viral on the internet, especially TikTok, as a "king sacrifice". While many people know this game, 3 years after a similar situation happened, where Pragg sacrificed his king against Vidit. The king-sacrificing trend became so popular, that it attracted a lot of people from social media to play chess for the first time, and it turned out to be a big popularity wave for chess. This is a really good example of how one mistake caused massively positive consequences. I think clips like this are a great way to bring more people to play chess, and with enough marketing maybe chess will be included in the next Olympic Games, who knows?
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