It's no sacrifice, no sacrifice, it's no sacrifice at all....

Ok, Elton.

Somewhere, I can hear Sir Elton John singing "Sacrifice."

Sorry, folks. I did have this game fully annotated, but I did not save them correctly.

With this game I will revisit a theme I often talk about, and that is, "can an average player have a brilliant game?" Usually, the answer I get back is an emphatic "No!" Any games I submit usually get the comment, "this isn't brilliant. Your opponent just played poorly." And the game is summarily dismissed. But when you examine the classic games, where one of the legends played brilliantly and disposed of his opponent rather quickly and in striking fashion, can we not say the same of the loser? To that end the brilliant game of the classic player is defended by saying that, though the loser played poorly, he too was a great player. Thus a player such as myself, playing comparably rated players, will never have a "great player" opponent that played poorly. If the above game had been played by two GMs, would it be so easily dismissed? I think not. To that the retort would be, "Yes, but two GMs would never play that way." And so once again, the game is dismissed.

As for this game, I thought it was quite interesting, and I wish it could have been played out to its end. Black resigned when he realized he had at the very least lost one of his rooks, already being down in material.

To be sure, there were odd moves by black (as I noted in my annotation, sorry again). So too can we identify odd moves by the loser(s) in the classic games. The brilliant games we study exploit those odd moves in the grandest, sometimes unexpected, fashion.

I for one choose not to dismiss the idea that any player, of any rating, can have a brilliant game.