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Brilliant Positional Sacrifice Played Today!

Brilliant Positional Sacrifice Played Today!

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GM mauricioflores
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This game will probably go down as one of the greatest games in Argentina's chess history. The rising star Faustino Oro, one of the most promising youngsters in the world, played White against the 7-time Argentine champion Diego Flores in the 100th edition of the Argentine Championship. If you prefer video format, you can checkout my analysis in my channel instead.

Let's see the game:

The key moment in the game, came on move 19th, where Black chose to play 19...f4!! offering up the pawn and an exchange after 20.Bxf4 gxf4 21.Qxg8. The point of that whole sequence is that he calculated that after 21...Qf6 he would have a massive compensation for the material, due to his overwhelming control of the dark-squares. This game in fact reminds me of two similar sacrifices: Bachmann-Shirov from the 2012 Olympiad and Fedoseev - Carlsen from the 2021 Candidates. If you are interested, you can find both games on Chess Imbalances my second book (and Chessable course in case you prefer video format).
In the game, White refrained from taking the sacrifice, and instead played 20.Qh3, but the resulting position became extremely complex. Just imagine having this position only a few moves later:

A few moves later, GM Diego Flores even had the opportunity to break through with a queen sacrifice that rendered White's position indefensible.

What can we learn from this game?

The clever 19...f4!! was not based on sheer calculation. In my opinion, that move was found because Black understood the powerful compensation that such a sacrifice would give them. That superior positional understanding allowed them to be open minded about the sacrifice in the first place. Once you see such an idea, calculating it works is not as difficult.