Friday, April 17, 2020

A Sham Queen Sacrifice

      In his book The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, Rudolf Spielmann distinguishes between real and sham sacrifices. 
      A sham sacrifice leads to a forced and immediate advantage, usually in the form of mate or regaining the sacrificed material after a forced line.
     In a real sacrifice the loss of material is offset by other compensation. 
     Bent Larsen wrote that giving up the Q for a R and two minor pieces is sometimes called a Queen sacrifice, but since a R plus two minor pieces is more valuable than the Q, he believed it should not be considered a sacrifice.
     In his book Spielmann doesn’t say anything specific about Queen sacrifices, but gives as examples Spielmqnn-Maroczy, Vienna, 1907 and Spielmann-Moller, Gothenburg, 1920. 
White mates in 8 moves: 

     In the above position I made a rare (for me) Queen sacrifice. It was a sham sacrifice because as Stockfish pointed out, I had a forced mate. At the time I thought it was a real sacrifice because, not seeing the mate, I envisioned my R strutting back and forth along the seventh rank capturing material and leaving me with, if not a mate, a material as well as a positional advantage and an easy win. Post mortem analysis with Stockfish convinced me that even with a huge evaluation in my favor there was no guarantee I could have won the ending as I envisioned it.
This is the position I envisioned:

     It didn't matter because we never reached the above position. In the first diagram after 17.Qh5+ Nxh5 18.Bg6+ nothing happened for about two minutes then I got a message that the disgusting little twit had left the site.


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