Sacrifice Your Queen and Win the game.
The trick I am going to show you now is popularly known as the Legal's mate or
the Blackburn trap. This trap works by a
queen sacrifice followed by checkmate
with minor pieces if Black accepts it. Let's
begin with the opening moves. We start with the king's pawn opening E4 E5.
Then knight F3 and Knight c6. Then
Bishop C4 and d6. This is the Italian game turned into Phildor Defence. What you need
to note here is the position of the pieces.
The sequence of moves could be different
but it will all result in the same position. So keep that in mind. From here ,you will play knight c3. Now there is a very common move that you will see from black and that is bishop
to g4. He is developing his bishop and at the same time,pinning your knight to the queen. But this actually is not a good move and you
can take advantage of this.
Let me tell you how...First ,you will simply
play pawn to h3. The best move for Black
now would actually be to capture the knight . But this is not something you will see often.
The most natural move that you will see from Black would be moving the bishop back to
h5 and persisting with the pin . This is exactly what you want black to play. You will now
start setting up your trap. You will begin with the surprising move knight to E5. Yes, you are inviting black to capture your queen with his bishop. If black tries to be greedy and takes
your queen, then he is gone. Because after bishop f7 check. Black has the only move king e7 and then knight d5 is checkmate and it's game over.
Now let me just go back and tell you another variation if black doesn't capture your queen . In this position, many of you might be wondering why we played this pawn to h3 , we could have a straight away gone for knight E5. But the problem here is that if black decides not to take the queen, then he can capture your knight and also defend his bishop from being captured by your queen . This will be a significant advantage for Black. So going back by playing h3 first and kicking the bishop back to h5 , we can take this pawn and now even if black doesn't take the queen and captures the knight ,we can capture the bishop first . And after this knight takes our bishop ,we can double attack by giving check and then capture the knight easily. If you look at the position, we are not only up a pawn but also significantly ahead in development.
This trick is something you should definitely try in Blitz and bullet games .
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or thoughts to share.
