How to Find and Play Brilliant Moves

"The brilliant moves are all there on the board sometimes, waiting to be made." - Me, 2023, based off a quote by the legendary Grandmaster Savielly Tartakower

In Chess, one of the most admired types of moves is a beautiful sacrifice. These moves - which Chess.Com will often classify as "Brilliant" - usually lead to a forced mate or at least a forced way to win back your material and more. Ultimately, there are positional sacrifices, but those are much harder to find. Today, we'll be going over examples of possible brilliant moves from some of my games, as well as how to identify when  a sacrifice works and when it's just gifting a piece to the opposition.

Not all the moves here were classified as Brilliants, but Chess.Com's system for whether or not something is a Brilliancy is both inconsistent and irritating. Due to this, the concepts you'll see in some of the sacrifices that didn't get the double exclamation mark label may still be incredibly useful in helping you find tactics that Chess.Com labels Brilliant.

Material Sacrifices:

The main types of Brilliancies are material ones, where you sacrifice a piece because you've calculated that it's either forced mate if your opponent takes, or that you'll gain more valuable pieces due to a fork, skewer, pin, or whatever tactic presents itself after your opponent takes your supposedly "free" piece.

There are two important things to remember here. The first is that the opposition doesn't have to take your piece back. So if you aren't taking a piece with your sacrifice and aren't moving to a better square, then you just wasted a move if whoever you're playing against avoids your trap, which they likely will at higher levels.

The second factor is pretty obvious: Make sure to calculate multiple lines, because oftentimes your opponent will be able to find an unexpected move that removes one of your attackers, forces checkmate, or just generally ruins your plans. So those are just a few of the gazillion reasons why, if you have time to do so, you should calculate these types of sacrifices thoroughly.

Puzzle #1:

This position was stolen from a Blitz game in which I had the White pieces against a 1600. I was getting destroyed, and I ultimately lost the game as I was mated when my opponent had 6 seconds left.

However, as shown in this puzzle, they could have found mate much earlier, as I realized during the match. Here, Black gives a check that I can't move my king out of or block. The only choice for me would have been to take the sacrificed queen with my knight, and that clears the file for Black's rook to slide down to E1 and deliver checkmate.

Instead, Qc1+ check was played, which allowed my king to escape and dance around the board, as the battle raged on for another 42 moves.

Puzzle #2:

This filthy but stunning move comes from a rapid game I played yesterday, where I reached a winning endgame but had little idea of how to capitalize on what, according to Stockfish, was supposedly a big advantage.

Fortunately, White hung their knight, and the solution to the puzzle was how I took advantage of that. By taking the knight on c2 with your rook, you appear to be sacrificing the exchange. However, my opponent saw that after they take back, their rooks are no longer doubled and now, my queen can take the unprotected one left behind on d3. Due to this, they resigned and I won through a dazzling flash of brilliancy.

Puzzle #3:

This is another wondrous tactic that I found in a recent Blitz game of mine, and it's forced mate regardless of whatever White does. If they ignore the rook on H2, Qg7 is checkmate no matter what.

After taking the rook, however, the puzzle demonstrates how Rh8+ forces the king back to g1, which allows you to move either your queen or your rook to h1 checkmate them. Because I can only input one solution to the puzzle, I inputted the queen mate because it's probably the one most people would play. However, either option works if you're actually playing in a game. and I actually decided to use the rook to checkmate.

Puzzle #4:

This is probably the best move, and it comes from a Rapid match I played way back 5 months ago. At that point, I was only 1236 elo, and was going up against someone who was rated very close to 1600 in an arena.

When I saw this tactic, I blinked repeatedly in shock and spent more than 10th of my time exploring all the lines, which may not have been the best move, because I flagged in a winning position eventually. However, my opponent took the knight with their bishop and blundered like this:

If taking with the bishop doesn't work because it stumbles into a fork of it and the rook, then what about taking with the pawn? Well, if you take with the pawn, everything is protected... At first.

As you can see here, neither option to take the knight works. In the above variation, once my bishop takes Black's bishop, their knight is unprotected and they have to choose between saving it or taking back my bishop with their pawn.

Due to this, the reason why Black didn't take the knight in the first puzzle, where I tried to simulate optimal play, is because doing so is losing. And this move is Brilliant, because it wins a pawn regardless of whatever nasty trick the opposition tries to pull.

Positional Sacrifices:

Annoyingly, sometimes sacrifices revolve around analyzing the position they will lead to, as opposed to simply calculating the material benefits of what appears to be a Brilliant move. These are much harder to analyze, and you'll not only have to calculate for potential responses, but you'll also have to have good understanding of when positional play is more important than having a lot of pieces on the board.

Because I'm trash at spotting Brilliant moves like these in general, and because they're less common - especially at my level - than more simple material sacrifices, none of the following examples are from games I've played.

Be warned that these sacrifices are only clear cut in the nonexistent eyes of engines, and that figuring them out will likely be a lot more challenging.

Puzzle #1:

This puzzle comes from a GothamChess video in which he showcased a game in which a player earned 11 Brilliancies, with this being the first one of the match. The reason this sacrifice works is because, if White takes your rook, you gain a nastily strong pair of pawns that are awfully close to promoting.

White here will have to funnel resources into diverting this attack and will likely have to use some of their major pieces for the sole purpose of locking down those pawns. This conveys that, despite the fact that you may be down materially, you still have a small advantage because the opposing pieces are crying idly in the corner.

Not to mention the fact that you have a couple of good plans for attacking that side of the board and trying to help your pawns promote. For instance, rerouting the knight so that it can be placed on c4 is an excellent way to threaten both the queen and the bishop, and defending against everything is even harder when that queen guards pieces like the pawn on e3.

Even if the player with the White pieces makes the smart decision and ignores your seemingly hanging rook, then they still have to move their bishop so that it's not taken and you gain a tempo. Oh, and how did the person in the video get 11 Brilliant moves? Well, they just left their piece takeable for 90% of the game, because it was in a decent position and they didn't need to remove it from that square.

Also, credit to Levy for highlighting and helping me understand this position, because I never would have been able to give this explanation if not for him and pretty much all the potential moves discussed in connection to this puzzle were outlined in his linked video.

Puzzle #2:

This disgusting sacrifice comes from a match in 1997 between Grandmaster Artur Yusupov and (then) International Master Narciso Dublan. Black has no choice but to accept your sacrifice, due to the fact that otherwise qh7 would be mate.

The funny thing is that, even though Black gives up a rook - a literal full major piece - and is only down by the point value of a pawn just a couple moves later. Here, the rook sacrifice allows you to take the knight and threaten the queen without the latter piece just scooping up 5 points of material.

Here, you may be down slightly, but Black's kingside has been completely ripped open and they now have to move their queen out of the range of your knight, and this gives you a turn to begin the attack on the now poorly protected king.

Yusupov here made 5 great moves after the sacrifice, and the opposition wasn't capable of holding up even for a little bit against the barrage stemming from the knights, rook, and queen. Now, no one expects someone to make a positional sacrifice and to suddenly turn into an AlphaZero level genius.

However, the point of positional sacrifices like this is to gain tempo or mainly to create an attack, as was done here. Sure, Yusupov may have found his way into a winning position quickly after the sacrifice, but it's still very possible to sustain pressure - or only give it up for a price - even if the person on the other side of the board correctly responds to it.

As Mikhail Tal famously said: "There are two types of sacrifices: Correct ones and mine."

Basically, the goal of a positional sacrifice is to create an attack, get more material involved, or just to confuse your opponent because we're all this very flawed thing called a human being and can have great difficulty finding the correct moves.

The sacrifices don't have to be accurate. Sometimes they'll be Brilliants and other times they'll be blunders, despite the fact that the latter isn't necessarily bad here. Ultimately, I would recommend giving this blog and this blog by GM Daniel Naroditsky a look, the second one of the links was the one I stole the above puzzle from. These will hopefully help guide you so that you can find positional sacrifices with strong likelihoods of working, and ones that might even win you the game. Or even better than winning: You might still lose but now you have a Brilliant you intentionally played as a sacrifice in the game analysis!

The Best Brilliant Move of All Time:

See if you can find this incredible Brilliant move. This legendary move was discovered not too long ago, and it has quickly risen to stardom and become one of the most played Brilliancies of Magnus Carlsenand Hikaru Nakamura's careers.

This beauteous wondrous move is surely a sign of the Chess gods favoring us, as humans discover the pinnacle of knowledge and underlying foundation of the universe: THE BONGCLOUD!

Meme made using Canva. Credit to Henrique Maldito on Pinterest and Istockphoto.Com for the images in it.