When we talk about chess sacrifices most of us remembers Mikhail Tal but today I am going to talk on Tigran Petrosian who was not only famous for his positional chess but for also his prophylaxes method and ‘Positional exchange sacrifice’.
In Kasparov’s words …..Petrosian introduced the exchange sacrifice for the sake of ‘quality of position’, where the time factor, which is so important in the play of Alekhine and Tal, plays hardly any role. Even today, very few players can operate confidently at the board with such abstract concepts. Before Petrosian no one had studied this. By sacrificing the exchange ‘just like that’, for certain long term advantages, in positions with disrupted material balance, he discovered latent resources that few were capable of seeing and properly evaluating.
There was a joke between Russian masters, which said “if Tal makes a sacrifice against you, then accept it, offer a draw and pray. If Petrosian makes a sacrifice against you, there’s no need to do anything: resign immediately”.
Here are some of the examples
· Exchange Sacrifice to create blockade the advance of pawns. (Reshevsky vs. Petrosian,1953)
· Sac against M. Tal 1958
· Sac against Gligoric to escape from difficult position 1962