Defining Sound

     What, exactly, is a sound sacrifice? An analyst playing over a game using an engine generally pontificates on how the loser could have prevailed if only he had found the right moves. 

     On the other hand, for the players actually sitting at the board, the answer to the question as to the soundness of a sacrifice is often not clear. That's because the disparity in ability is likely going to be the predominate factor. That's the situation we see in the following game. Zinner's sacrifice on move 12 might have worked against a less able tactician than Keres! 

     Czech master Emil Zinner August 23, 1909 - July 8, 1942) played for Czechoslovakia in 3rd unofficial Chess Olympiad at Munich 1936, and won individual bronze medal at third board (+14 –5 =1). He also played in the Olympiad at Stockholm 1937 at third board and scored +9 –4 =4. Chessmetrics assigns him a high rating of 2573 on the July 1937 rating list, placing him at number 49 in the world. 

     In October of 1941 construction began on the Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin with the arrival of about 2,000 Soviet POWs. Most of them were too weak to work and virtually all were dead by February, 1942. 

     In December of 1941, the SS began rounding up Jews off the streets of Lublin and they were the first Jewish prisoners to be incarcerated in Majdanek. During January and February 1942, the SS and police rounded up more Polish Jews from the Lublin ghetto and brought them to Majdanek for forced labor. Conditions in the camp during the bitterly cold winter of 1941-1942 were lethal. The SS routinely shot prisoners too weak to work either on the edge of the camp grounds or in the Krepiecki Forest north of Lublin. 

     During the summer of 1942, the SS and police sent thousands more Czech Jews, most of them in their 20s and 30s, to Majdanek as forced laborers. Zinner was caught up in the dragnet and was murdered by the Nazis in Majdanek on July 8, 1942.