“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.” ― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Magic does happen on the chess board; that is one of the main reasons that this mystical game has kept me enthralled for as long as I can remember. Some people go to an art museum to experience beauty, but as chess players, we are lucky enough to be able to create our own piece of art over 64 squares. What captures our imagination as much as a queen sacrifice? A queen sacrifice means we have to bravely give up our most important piece in order to create some magic on the board.
In this article, I will be sharing some of the most vivid examples of this concept with you. These are both examples that I have seen and examples which I have been able to play.
To start, let's take a look at one of my favorite moves of all time.
Evans Gambit declined-Brilliant Queen sacrifice
Helms H - Tenner Oscar [C51]
Possible reasons for a queen sacrifice include:
a forced checkmate after the opponent takes the queen;
more than adequate material compensation (say, a rook and two knights) after a forced continuation;
clearing the way for a pawn's promotion to a replacement queen;
the subsequent capture of the opponent's queen, resulting in some positional or material gain.
On the other hand, "real" sacrifices, according to Spielmann, are those where the compensation is not immediate, but more positional in nature. Because the queen is the most powerful piece (see chess piece relative value), positional sacrifices of the queen virtually always entail some partial material compensation (for example, sacrificing the queen for a rook and bishop).
An opportunity may arise where a player trades off his queen for other pieces which may together be of equal or greater value than the queen. Bent Larsen remarks that giving up the queen for a rook and two minor pieces is sometimes called a "queen sacrifice", but since a rook plus two minor pieces is more valuable than the queen, he says it should not be considered a sacrifice.
