Brilliant Sacrificial Attack by Ghizdavu

     Zvonko Vranesic (born 4 October 1938) is a Croatian–Canadian International Master both OTB and in correspondence chess. He is an electrical engineer, a university professor, and a developer of computer chess software. Vranešić was born in Zagreb. He won the Junior Championship of Yugoslavia in 1957 and immigrated to Canada in October 1958, settling in Toronto. He began competing with success in Canadian chess tournaments, soon after his arrival. Vranesic won the Toronto City Championship in 1959 (with a perfect score), and repeated in 1967, 1970, and 1972. He won the Ontario Open Championship in 1959 and 1963.
     Ghizdavu, originally from Romania, was born in 1949 and sometime in the early 70’s moved to the US where he lived in Cleveland, Ohio. I remember a small tournament sponsored by my chess business partner in which Ghizdavu was playing shortly after his arrival in the US. I got off work one Saturday and stopped by the venue and was surprised to see his name on the wallboard ranked number one with a rating of around 2450. Remember that at that time 2450 was an astronomical rating. I also remember that he used to annotate games for the old Chess Informants and he was very active in chess in the Cleveland area until abandoning the game a few years after moving there. He is an International Master.
     In the following game Ghizdavu’s 17.g4 set an ingenious trap and Vranesic fell for it, realized it too late the cleverness of Ghizdavu’s play and tried to back out, but by then his position was lost. He fought on and Ghizdavu began delivering one hammer blow after another that secured the win.