First, let me remind you of the Giveaway we’re conducting on the RCA YouTube Channel, celebrating the milestone achievement of 50,000 subscribers. By participating in the Giveaway, you get a chance to win an RCA chess course completely FREE! All you have to do is to subscribe to our YouTube channel and comment (anything about chess) below the Giveaway video. You can find the complete details about the Giveaway in this blog-post. The last date to participate is Monday, 30 September!Positional sacrifices in chess are the hardest to make, even for top grandmasters. They require a very deep strategic understanding of the game. Unlike the normal sacrifices, where the player sacrifices a piece/pawn to attack the opponent’s king or regain material, the aim of positional sacrifices is to get a positional advantage.

They are so hard to make that even chess engines don’t spot them easily. Today we are going to see one such brilliant positional queen sacrifice – it’s from the game played between Yuri Gusev and Yuri Averbakh in the year 1946.

White to play

Black just played 23…Rc6 attacking the white queen. You can notice that White has already made an exchange sacrifice in an effort to create weakness around the black king. How would you play here as White?

Suggested: Mikhail Tal sacrificing all his pieces – from pawn to queen!

White made a brilliant positional queen sacrifice here; yes, it’s the move 24.Qxe5, opening up the f-file. And guess what the engine evaluated – it said -4.85. But, 10 moves later, it said +15.64. It’s a sacrifice that defied chess engines! Could you see the plan behind the queen sacrifice? After calculating all possible variations, you can enjoy the video analysis by our guest coach CM Tryfon Gavriel:

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