Top 5 Chess Sacrifices Every Player Must Know

This article is a continuation of the last week’s Top 10 Tactical Tricks Every Chess Player Must Know. This time we are focusing on the most typical sacrifices that occur often in practical games.

Why is it important to know about it? Let me tell you, that even if you are a positional player you must know what to look out for in your games. If you are an attacking player, you will be the one looking to include these in your repertoire. Today will learn about e5, h7, g8 and f7 sacrifices among other things.

Position 1: Sacrifice on e6

Isaac Boleslavsky – Salomon Flohr, 1950

Position 2: Sacrifice on f7

Arthur William Dake – Jim Schmitt, 1949

In order to be proficient at finding tactics such as forks, smothered mates, checkmates, pins, and skewers you need to solve problems on daily bases. If you are aiming for a serious progress, consistency is the key. Sure you may skip a day or two here and there, but the point is to work on tactics at least for 20 minutes a day everyday.

Once you’re doing that, you should throw positional training, endgames training, and attacking training into the equation and the success is almost guaranteed for you. Things can be a little confusing though, but don’t worry we tried to make learning chess as easy as possible, by creating a step-by-step, day-by-day  training programthat will help to take your chess to the next level.

Position 3: Sacrifice on h7

Position 4: Sacrifice on g8

Arthur William Dake – Jim Schmitt, 1949

Position 5: Sacrifice on g8

Louis Paulsen – Paul Morphy, 1857