The Gambler in Chess

NM JulianLinChess

Updated: Jan 13, 2015, 10:20 PM | 6

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I would like to thank titust for this submission

And WOAH. this is an out of the blue sacrifice that takes the game to a whole new dimension. White has an extra piece, BUT:

White has spent some moves in the opening weakening his queenside and neglecting development

White now needs to be careful with his king and suddenly needs to be focusing for the rest of the game

... my analysis suggests that Black has sufficient compensation for the sacrifice, as we will see later. Continuing with the game:

Now let's try to figure out what's the best continuation for Black. We know that we should have a strong attack because of White's rebellious opening play, but it is one thing to talk principle and another thing to talk concrete facts.

Take a moment to think what we should play:

The 2 main candidate moves were ...Ng4+ and ...Ne4+

The reason we must check with the knight now is because White was threatening to play Nf3, followed by hiding the king on g1, or g3, followed by hiding the king on g2. With that in mind, we must check the king and move it to an inferior square to g2/g3 IMMEDIATELY.

Ne4 is superior to Ng4 because it centralizes the knight and forces the king to the inferior e3 square. The lines are supported by calculation which are given below

Black instead played ...Ng4+ which leads me to believe that the ...Bxf2+ was played without calculating the concrete variations seen above. Instead, it was played on pure intuition and feeling, also known as Gambling

Now the game takes on an exciting turn!

The position is a bit wacky, but that doesn't mean that we can't calculate. Can you find a tricky idea here for Black to activate his pieces?

Hint: Activate your pieces (seriously!)

The idea is easy to spot if you were thinking about activating all your pieces. Black played a more complicated battle, and the battle carried on:

In this game, we saw that while it is important to keep in minds concepts and ideas while playing, it is still more important to maintain a strong level of calculation.

Black played a creative opening sacrifice and played it by feel, which gave White the chance to seize the advantage. But White played the position by feel as well, and the messy positions were just unsuitable for this kind of play.

Thank you for reading!

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