Checkmate with QUEEN SACRIFICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The funniest thing is that the smothered mate would have worked one move earlier, starting with 21. Nc7+. White misses it, black defends against it, white tries anyway, and black decides to get mated instead of winning. Solid game.
The White queen seems to be insistent on crashing its way to the back rank.
16...Bxe4 ruins the queen sacrifice, now it's a queen loss.
Good thing my opponent missed it
16...Bxe4 ruins the queen sacrifice, now it's a queen loss.
Good thing my opponent missed it
But a very bad thing that you missed it.
If you want to get better, you can't just throw away your queen like that. Stop doing these blunders, this is the only thing that matters.
Neither "queen sacrifices" (those of Bekauri and CatPlayz_Chess) are in the view of some chess theorists technically sacrifices (even if the first had been done properly a move earlier). They are rather combinations in which acceptance of the proffered piece leads to a forced mate (if we charitably forget Bekauri's opponent's inconvenient knight!).
A combination is a tactical sequence which forces the recipient into making moves for which the material advantage is visible to the combination's author. A true sacrifice occurs when significant material is offered for positional advantage in the hope that that positional advantage will prove to be decisive. Tal's sacrifices, or many of them, belong in this category. True queen sacrifices are therefore very rare, one example being Nezhmetdinov's famous win, the subject of a number of YouTube videos. I seem to remember another in a collection of Petrosian's best games.
Let me give a couple of examples from my own games, both played in the rapid format. I can't take responsibility for the quality of the opposition. As they say, you can only play what's in front of you!
The first is NOT a queen sacrifice but a queen-offering combination. I can only account for black's play as the desperate desire to hang onto that Queen's Gambit Accepted pawn.
The second is a true sacrifice of a knight designed to take advantage of the fact that accepting the sacrifice will open the centre up and allow white to take advantage of the uncoordinated nature of black's pieces, and the isolation of black's queen.
I was white in both games. The first is not a queen sacrifice but a combination. The second is a sacrifice, albeit not a queen sacrifice.
Neither "queen sacrifices" (those of Bekauri and CatPlayz_Chess) are in the view of some chess theorists technically sacrifices (even if the first had been done properly a move earlier). They are rather combinations in which acceptance of the proffered piece leads to a forced mate (if we charitably forget Bekauri's opponent's inconvenient knight!).
Sometimes called a "pseudo-sac".
A true sacrifice does not lead to a mathematically calculable outcome.
Here's an example of a true sacrifice (of a Knight, in this case):