a question about sacrifices and sacrifice showcase

Do the stronger players get lots of opportunities for sound sacrifices? Do they find that they have to steer the game towards it, you know, co-ordinate their attacking pieces before making that final leap into sacrificing material? I ask this because I have long found sacrifices the most enticing part of chess;I find the games of Tal and Morphy a thousand times more exhilarating than even the aggressive bullying of Kasparov and Fischer. I rarely, however, get the opportunity to make a good sacrifice, and usually when I do, it either fails miserably and/or HIARCS calls it a straight out blunder.

also, I would like people to post their games involving sacrifices here, because I enjoy them so.

Well, i'm far from a strong player, but i've watched a few famous game and i've noticed if you're careful about when and what you sacrifice, good things seem to happen.  Take Edward Lasker vs. G. Thomas, Lasker sacrificed his queen and afterwards managed to march Thomas's king all the way down the field and checkmated him in his own first row.  I can't post it since i found it on youtube, but you should look it up.

you're talking about this game;

http://www.chess.com/article/view/an-immortal-brilliancy

I imagined people would have more to say about it......

Steinitz once said that an attack will eventually fail unless the attacker has a favorable imbalance in that area of the board.  For example, if your opponent's pieces are all located on the queenside, a kingside attack will likely work because his pieces cannot defend his king.  If there is a weakness in a certain area of the board, an attacker can take advantage of that.  Also, an attacker needs to learn how to create these weaknesses in his opponent's position

I understand.maybe its asking a bit much, but can you think of any instructive games that demonstrate this idea?

Check out one of my blog posts entitled "Sweet OTB Game"  It is a good example of sacrificing when your opponent's pieces are on the other side of the board

I'm particularly fond of Rainbow Rising's rook sacrifice followed by mate with the pawn. Nice finish, killabeez as well. I suppose sound sacrifices are all the more spectacular when both sides have played only inaccuracies as opposed to mistakes and blunders.

"Enthusiasm for the sacrifice lies in man's nature"

Rudolf Spiellman.

"the only place the average a man will make a sacrifice is during a game of chess, which is, by-the-way, the only place that women won't."

I forget, some author.

Here's a game that I posted elsewhere. It is a fairly blunderific game, but ends in a double rook sac for mate- one passive, one active.

Wow! Thanks for posting the Lasker game... I enjoy sacrifices very much myself and that is one of the best games I have ever encountered. Amazing that white forced black from his bank rank ALL the way to whites back rank for mate!

Rainbow; I've played a lot more since then. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't miss that now. I've become a lot more proficient and aware of pins.

The thing about sacrifices is that there are a few types.

There are sacrifices where you get a positional benefit equivalent or greater to the piece you sacrifice (such as an exposed king for a knight or something).

There are sacrifices where the only point is to unnerve your opponent. Most sacrifices I've played with and against OTB are this type. I may not have adequate material or positional compensation for the piece(s) but I gained an edge psychologically and that pays off either due to my opponent spending too much time or thinking I have compensation and thus nervous and making a bad move.

Another type of sacrifice is the unsound sacrifice (see the Fried Liver Attack). This sacrifice may attempt to unnerve your opponent but generally it is a patzer sacrifice for the love of sacrificing pieces. I used to do this a lot, or like I would trade my knight for their R & N pawns to keep my bishop pinning their knight to a queen or king. This is fun to play, but almost always ends up with you losing as it doesn't really unnerve your opponent, nor does it give you any adequate compensation, it just makes the board uneven, and with you at the bottom. If you win after making one of these, chances are you would win anyway because your opponent is generally a worse player than you are.

All the grandmasters & champions that make sacrifices rarely do so unless it is a type A sacrifice. (ie Fischer's Queen Sac, or Morphy's Sacs). They actually look ahead and decide that it is worthwhile for them to do it because it doesn't lead to them losing.

One thing about sacrifices I've noticed is that they don't usually require lots of preparation, as if they require lots of preparation it is more of an attack than a sacrifice, as you'll have other pieces around, hence the preparation. The best sacrifices generally arise when your opponent dismisses a move. We cannot look at every single move, so we naturally ignore moves like Rxb2 or Nxf6, or Bxd5 etc. The moves your opponent just automatically ignores are generally the best opportunities to sacrifice pieces, but as they are the moves you automatically ignore, they are hard to spot. Some players such as Tal just had an intuitive ability to see moves that other players automatically ignore and then they have opportunity to make these sacrifices.

However, the reason you automatically ignore these moves is because 99% of the time they are blunders, and they are awful moves. But it is these where the sacrifice is born, I've found.

would you know it, my last game just happens to have a sacrifice!

This concept of playing on the area where you have the majority of pieces to your opponent's minority is generally called power play. When you look at the board and see that you have an overwealming amount of pieces well placed to attack a certain area then you should know that it's likely there are combinations to be found, so start by considering the forcing continuations and this is when the sacrifices if there are any will start presenting themselves to you.

Nice game!

thank you very much for saying so, Rainbow. I guess that what I really mean is that other than bringing out the queen too early, which I also hate, I don't like queen heavy games; in my last ten moves of that game, I moved the queen seven times. I know it's winning, but it just looks so clumsy, so aesthetically unappealing....

atomicchicken;

that's a georgous combination, exactly the kind of thing that gives me wood( pun intended). The thing is, I never get the chance to play positional games. Every time I try, for example, the ruy lopez, the opponent manages to steer the game into sharper lines and more open settings, so I never get to a position that's even close to that. I understand the principle now, but application is probably the important thing here.

p.s. atomicchicken, thanks for saying so. also, gotta love a jeff fan.

Next up is a game where I sacrificed an exchange (RxN) to open up the board and get myself some attacking opportunities.

That seems to be where 99% of my sacrifices happen. demolishing the king's stronghold. I've stop doing that so much because it's often refuted

the second game is amazing, mueller, I never would have seen it in a million years. Plus, in the end, I probably would have bowed in and exchanged queens. I completely missed the winning move.

<edit: I'm not sure why that came out as a puzzle instead of a game>

Well the more open the position, the more you should get chances for tactics. Which is a good thing to practice such concepts. If you play 1. e4 you should certainly get into more tactical positions than I usually get into anyway playing a stodgy old Torre all the time. Having the chance to play such combinations is quite unusual in my games so you should stick with playing things like the Ruy while you're still developing your tactics I think. Here's my last game to prove a point where there was absolutely no chance of pulling off flashy combinations for either side and it came to a pretty boring conclusion in the end: