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Mastering The Positional Queen Sacrifice

Mastering The Positional Queen Sacrifice

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dynamicchess970
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What exactly is a positional queen sacrifice?When you give up your queen but in return you get compensation that may be in terms of light square/dark square control OR The opponent's king safety is compromised OR you have good outposts for your pieces OR you get to have better piece coordination.There can be many reasons to go for a positional queen sacrifice.

I was introduced to this powerful concept by playing online,watching videos and reading about it and studying some games and I found it to be a very useful weapon against strong players.Now,in the very recent game played in round 4 of the strongest tournament ever-The Altibox Norway 2017 where Magnus Carlsen took a tragic loss against Levon Aronian,who must be given due credit for his play.Here is the game.

HOWEVER,on move 14,instead of b4 had Aronian tried to trap the queen -->

In the 2017 Gibraltar CHess Festival,a game happened where Hou Yifan lost in only 6 moves as a protest because she was only being paired with female chess players.However,this brilliant positional queen sacrifice played by her in the same tournament did not get enough limelight.

 
Now I'd like to show you my favourite positional queen sacrifice played by none other than Garry Kasparov against Vladimir Kramnik
The final one is from one of my own games that I played against a friend of mine and is somewhat similar to the last example.Here it is!I like to call it "My immortal queen scarifice"just for fun.I hope you like it.