Chess Tips: How to Sacrifice

Hi everyone! Welcome to my fifth blog in the series I created the series called "Chess Tips" where I teach you some useful skills you can use in your own games. Now let's get started!

Sacrificing is pretty exciting to watch because most of the time, you keep your pieces safe and sound. You gave away one of your pieces in order to get an advantage. In this blog, I will teach you how you can use different types sacrificing to checkmate or gain material.

#1 Exchange sacrifice.

Exchange sacrifice is when you (for example) take a knight with a rook, and when the opponent captures back, you win another valueble piece(Another rook, or maybe a queen). Here is an example.

#2 Expose the king.

Another common reason to sacrifice is to destroy your opponent's king safety so that it is easier for you to attack. Here is an example.

#3 Squar Clearance.

Sometimes, you would like one of your piece on a particular square. But what hapens if one of your pieces are already on it? If the reward is great enough, you can sacrifice the piece that is in the way. Here is a typical example.

#4 Gain of tempo.

What is a tempo? Think of a tempo like a free move. Let's say you give your opponent a check. But the opponent have to get out of check and can't play the move he/she wants to play. Below is an example featuring checkmate+sacrifice.

#5 The queen sacrifice.

Sacrificing the queen is very exciting since the queen i sthe most valuable piece. Usually, sacrificing the queen is to checkmate the enemy king. Here is 1 example.

That is all for this blog! Thank you so much for reading it, I really appreciated it and pls comment if you learned something new! I hope you have a nice day! Now see you next week!