The two-bishop sacrifice is alive and kicking!

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normajeanyates

The two-Bishop sac [aka the Lasker-Bauer sac] belongs to the 'glorious' age of the game, and with the advent of 'scientific chess', it is extinct. Okay, annotations have variations that go 'not xyz? Bxh7+!' and so on..

But in the game itself as played at the highest levels, it is extinct, right? Well, judge for yourself :)

Judit Polgar v Karpov, 7th Essent 2003. Petroff defence. 1-0.

 

MrZugzwang

Judit Polgar is simply amazing.  I'm baffled that people can look at her games and still say that women are somehow genetically ill-equiped to play chess.

24 ... Qc5 ?? Was a very un-Karpov like blunder, putting the Black Queen where the pawn on d5 blocks it on defense.  It's interesting to speculate how Judit would have proceeded if Karpov had sensed the danger and played ...g6, or ..f5, or even ...h6. 

normajeanyates

I think Karpov nodded off.. :)

Which is not to say that Judit Polgar is not great! I hear she is unwell [nothing serious]; I hope she gets well soon..

In a correspondence game [i.e. engines, tablebases allowed] on another site, I have a probably winning advantage because opponent did not consider Ju. Polgar's c.2003 theoretical novelty ( and why at the highest levels, white's previous move has not been played since..)

sstteevveenn

well for one thing, she is just one woman.  People can look at a very fast woman sprinter and say women are slower than men. 

 

Very nice, neat game btw.  Love that rook manoeuvre, and pawn advance.  Not sure what karpov was doing with Na5 though.  Cool

normajeanyates

re that R-manoeuvre, one thing most books don't tell you is that the purpose of occupying a semi-open file by a rook is not only to reach the 7th file -  an often unfeasible goal against good opponents - but to 'boost' the R up advantageously [1].

Or to threaten to do so... [a threat is more potent than its execution..]

 

[1] elementary books consider it too confusing for the target audience; advanced books assume that the target audience knows :)