Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice

18.01.2025

There are many sports and personal criteria by which coaches choose their students for the draughts section. It seems to us that a child’s ability to sacrifice his checker or queen to gain a winning position or to save a hopeless situation is a very important criterion. The ability to sacrifice reveals many personal characteristics in the personality of an athlete. At the same time, the Victim of checkers (or checkers) It’s always Beautiful! And you can flip the position from top to bottom.

Today we will look at some examples from the parties and training examples on the topic of “Sacrifice”.

Sometime in 2022, when parsing the games of our Draughts League 2022 tournament, we discovered an interesting sacrifice that caught our attention.

Diagram 1

N. Nano – A. Krapivina, “Draughts League 2022”

In the games, black attacked 1….21-26? and after White’s answer of 2. 33-28, they got a lost position.

Black then missed the winning victim.:

1…1520! 2. 24х15 2. 18-22! 3. 27х18 3. 13х22 and the threats become inescapable.

And now two years have passed… We have not found any parties in which such a victim would be found. But in 2024, at the World Cup tournament in China, we found the following position.

Diagram 2

V. Mitrevich – M. Van Ijzendoorn,  World Cup Tournament 9th “Xingqiu Cup”

After White’s last move of 1. 36-31??, it followed:

1….  14-20! 2. 24:15  18-22! 3. 27:18  13:22, and the threats become inescapable.

Sacrifice is always unexpected. So far, they have named this type of victim, jokingly:

The victim of Anna and Martin.

Equally unexpected and beautiful, victims of checkers are also found in Russian draughts. At the last Russian Draughts World Championship in Moscow, the author of these lines had a chance to experience the power of this technique.

Diagram 3

V. Teterin – A. Georgiev, World Championship 2024

In this position, White had two possible answers: bc3 and dc3. In the game, White chose dc3. But in their calculations, they missed Black’s effective sacrifice.

1.dc3  fe5 2. ef4  gf6 (it is impossible to exchange 3. hg5, 4. cb4 for making trouble on the f6 field, because of the counterattack of 4…. hg5, 5. de5!) 3. fe3 and after an effective sacrifice 3…. ab4! 4. cc7 db6,

Diagram 4, the situation of the whites became hopeless.

An interesting position could have been obtained with white’s bc3 move.

Diagram 5

1.bc3  fg5(on black’s move 1. … fe5, after the exchange 2.hg5, it’s better for white) 2. gh4 dc7 and then!, like a bolt from the blue, the sacrifice of two draughts occurs!!. 3. cd4!! eg3 4. hf4!

Black has two extra draughts and it’s his turn, but there’s no payoff in sight!

Now, after reviewing our examples, try to solve two training examples from Vladimir Milshin’s Workbooks yourself.

Diagram 6

 

 

We believe that you will be able to resolve this position!

Diagram 7

We will continue to look for interesting examples.

 

 

 

Telegram_logo Icons8