Catalogue text:

Sacrifices are an essential part of chess. Those who never consider sacrificing will miss countless opportunities and find that promising positions repeatedly slip away. Players who do not appreciate their opponents' sacrificial possibilities will be unable to see danger signs, and find themselves on the wrong end of too many king-hunts.
In this unique book, popular author David LeMoir investigates in detail the most important Standard sacrificial ideas. Rather than merely cataloguing the various possibilities and providing examples, he discusses the possible follow-ups to the sacrifices, the defensive options against them, and the positional factors that might suggest whether the sacrifice will be sound or unsound. There are many important types of chess positions that can only be played well by those who understand the thematic sacrifices that are possible. The sacrificial ideas covered in this book lie at the heart of some very popular opening Systems, and indeed there are few games in which one or another of these sacrifices isn't relevant.

Standard Sacrifices
This book is about standard sacrifices, so called because they occur frequently in practice. There are Greek Gifts of bishops on h.7 chasing the king to its doom; knight and bishop sacrifices on e6 and b5 and knight sacrifices on d5 in the Sicilian Defence that seem to flow straight out of the opening; knight invasions on the empty f6-square that strangle the defender's king to death.
In games in books and magazines, they always seem to succeed, don't they? On the other hand, if we ever get the chance to play one, the story is different. We forget the right follow-up, or some little detail turns out to be wrong.
After the Greek Gift, the defender's king marches boldly in front of its pawns and then slips quietly away behind its f- or e-pawn. After a sacrifice in the Sicilian we find that we're not actually threatening anything and our opponent can blithely carry on with his usual counterplay. After a Nf6 sacrifice against the castled king, we find that we cannot hold our pawn that lands on f6; by capturing it the defender is able to cover the squares on which we intended to mate him.
We are more careful next time the opportunity arises. There appear to be too many defenders around and too few of our own men to carry out the attack. We shy away and play something else. Have we missed out on the chance fat a brilliancy? We might never know. Until now, that is.

Why Read this Book?
The purpose of this book is simple: to make the reader benefit from standard sacrifices, and not suffer from them. I will explain the types of position in which they are likely to succeed or fail, the different ways to follow them up, and the resources available to the defender.
I shall concentrate on standard sacrifices of apiece. (There is one exception: the Double Bishop sacrifice - Bxh7+ followed by Bxg7 - which is really a variation on the Greek Gift.) There are many of them - fifteen are covered here - and they are fundamental to our understanding of attack and defence in chess.
We shall travel from left to right, starting with sacrifices on b5, where an endgame win is often the objective, and finishing with sacrifices on the h-file, where the king is definitely the target.
Many modern openings have their own related standard piece sacrifices, the Sicilian Defence being the most prolific. If we wish to understand an opening and play it successfully, as White or Black, we must become familiar with its standard sacrifices. Besides helping us to score some easy victories, this familiarity should enable us to mine the path of our opponent's defence with the potential for lethal sacrifices, and also avoid our well-laid thematic plans being scuppered by an unforeseen standard sacrifice.
To help understand how each sacrifice arises, wherever I have the opening moves available I give the play up to the position where it was played.
One of my aims is to encourage players who rarely sacrifice to play standard sacrifices, because learning many of them can be similar to learning a positional technique or variations of a favourite opening, and removes much of the risk. My readers should find that they save time on the clock by quickly assessing whether a standard sacrifice is playable, and by using their memory to aid their calculation.
When a sacrifice occurs, the emotional tension is instantly raised. Both sides, but especially the defender, start to make mistakes, as many of the games in this book will testify (see my book How to Be Lucky in Chess for chapter-and-verse on why and how that happens). Greater familiarity with the most common sacrifices should enable us to keep our head when our opponent is losing his, whichever side of the sacrifice we are on.
In short, it is my firm belief that, by learning to understand these essential sacrifices, they can work for us and not against us.

Fifteen Standard Piece Sacrifices?
I have selected most of the popular standard piece sacrifices.
In each case, I assembled a large database of examples, mainly by automatic searching of Mega Database 2001, the CD-ROM of Informator numbers 50-75, and a database developed from weekly downloads of The Week in Chess. This electronic database was supplemented by manual searches through my collection of chess books and magazines.
For each sacrifice, I took a fairly random selection of around one hundred examples, including many games which were already annotated. I examined each game in order to identify the themes and the lessons which arise most frequently.
The games that appear in this book (averaging around seventeen per standard sacrifice) are not necessarily the best or most brilliant available, but are those which should give readers the best feel for the sacrifices and the play that follows them.
Each chapter features sacrifices with the same first move. In some cases (such as Nf6 sacrifices) there are only a few key themes involved, and the play can almost be learned by rote. In other cases (such as Nxf7 sacrifices) there is a huge variety of themes involved. In that case I have covered the key themes, but there are more of them, and the explanations are less detailed.
In reality, therefore, this book probably covers at least forty standard piece sacrifices. Some are predominantly positional, but most are nakedly aggressive in their intent.

How to Make Sacrifices Work
I am hoping that my readers will, on the way, learn a great deal about attacking play, because many lessons recur throughout these pages:
" Don't be in a hurry to regain material.
" Few sacrifices work if the attacker cannot bring several pieces, particularly the queen, into the attack with great speed.
" Exposing the king can be crucial, so a second sacrifice is often justified in order to complete the destruction of its fortress.
" If we can permanently cramp the defender's king for room, or cut off its escape route, we can take our time about bringing our reserve pieces into the attack.
A more complete list can be found in Chapter 16.
During the writing of this book, I have discovered an enormous amount about standard sacrifices. I now have greater confidence in judging any piece sacrifice, and my opponent could not mistake my smile when I recently plonked a knight down on f5 (en prise to a pawn at g6) and rose to let him contemplate his fate. There was genuine confidence in my eyes, soon reflected by the desperation in his...