Sacrifice (chess)

In chess, a sacrifice is a move giving up a piece with the objective of gaining tactical or positional compensation in other forms. A sacrifice could also be a deliberate exchange of a chess piece of higher value for an opponent's piece of lower value.

Any chess piece except the king may be sacrificed. Because players usually try to hold on to their own pieces, offering a sacrifice can come as an unpleasant surprise to one's opponent, putting him off balance and causing much precious time to be wasted trying to calculate whether the sacrifice is sound or not and whether to accept it. Sacrificing one's queen (the most valuable piece), or a string of pieces, adds to the surprise, and such games can be awarded brilliancy prizes.

Types of sacrifice

Real versus sham

Rudolf Spielmann proposed a division between sham and real sacrifices:

Sacrifice (2010 film)

Sacrifice is a 2010 Chinese historical drama film directed by Chen Kaige, starring Ge You, Wang Xueqi, Huang Xiaoming, Fan Bingbing and Vincent Zhao. It is based on the Yuan dynasty play The Orphan of Zhao by Ji Junxiang. It was distributed in the United States by Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Plot

The story is set in Jin, a ducal state under the Zhou dynasty, during the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China. Zhao Dun, the chancellor of Jin, and his son, General Zhao Shuo, have a feud with General Tu'an Gu. Tu'an Gu secretly murders the Duke of Jin and pushes the blame to the Zhao family, using that as an excuse to massacre the Zhao family. The sole survivor is Zhao Shuo's baby son, Zhao Wu, whose mother is the Duke's elder sister, Lady Zhuang. Lady Zhuang pleads with Tu'an Gu's subordinate, Han Jue, to spare her child. She then instructs Cheng Ying, a physician, to bring the child to Gongsun Chujiu, a friend of the Zhao family, before committing suicide. When Tu'an Gu learns that the orphan had escaped, he slashes his sword at Han Jue's face in anger and disfigures him. Tu'an Gu then issues an order to seal the gates and to gather all newborn babies in the city. The plan was to identify the Zhao orphan since Tu'an Gu was counting on the person hiding the baby to not hand over the baby to him, hence singling out the one baby left in the city to be the Zhao infant.

Sacrifice (Sylver album)

Sacrifice is Sylver's fifth studio album, released on 12 May 2009 in Belgium. The workingtitle was 'Resurrection', in the end Sylver decided to name the album 'Sacrifice'. Guitarist John Miles Jr. (son of John Miles) is also on the album cover, who joined the band a short while before.

Track listing

CD album (Cat.No. ARS 2706974)

Singles

Sacrifice (2009)

Sacrifice (2009) was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), which took place on May 24, 2009 at the TNA Impact! Zone in Orlando, Florida. It was the fifth event under the Sacrifice chronology. There were eight matches on the card.

The show's main event was a Four Way Ultimate Sacrifice match, which pitted TNA World Heavyweight Champion, Mick Foley, against Sting, Kurt Angle, and Jeff Jarrett with each participant wagering an important aspect of their career: Foley's title, Sting's career, Angle's leadership of the Main Event Mafia, and Jarrett's shares in the company. The match was ultimately won by Sting, who pinned Angle, thus winning leadership of the Main Event Mafia.

There were two other high-profile matches with A.J. Styles defending the TNA Legends Championship against Booker T in an "I Quit" match as well as Beer Money, Inc. winning the "Team 3D Invitational Tag Team Tournament" against The British Invasion. Other matches on the undercard included: a six-man tag team match between the team of Jay Lethal, Consequences Creed, and Eric Young versus the Motor City Machineguns and Sheik Abdul Bashir, Daffney versus Taylor Wilde in a Monster's Ball match, Christopher Daniels challenging Suicide for his TNA X Division Championship, Angelina Love defending her title against Awesome Kong, and Samoa Joe versus Kevin Nash.

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. Chess is played by millions of people worldwide, both amateurs and professionals.

Each player begins the game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. Each of the six piece types moves differently. The most powerful piece is the queen and the least powerful piece is the pawn. The objective is to 'checkmate' the opponent's king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player's pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces, while supporting their own. In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by voluntary resignation by the opponent, which typically occurs when too much material is lost, or if checkmate appears unavoidable. A game may also result in a draw in several ways.

Chess is believed to have originated in India, some time before the 7th century; the Indian game of chaturanga is also the likely ancestor of xiangqi and shogi. The pieces took on their current powers in Spain in the late 15th century; the rules were finally standardized in the 19th century.

Chess annotation symbols

When annotating chess games, commentators frequently use widely recognized annotation symbols. Question marks and exclamation points that denote a move as bad or good are ubiquitous in chess literature. Some publications intended for an international audience, such as the Chess Informant have a wide range of additional symbols that transcend language barriers.

The common symbols for evaluating the merits of a move are "??", "?", "?!", "!?", "!", and "!!". In these cases, the corresponding symbol is juxtaposed in the text immediately after the move (e.g. Re7? or Kh1!?, see algebraic chess notation).

Use of these annotation symbols is subjective, as different annotators use the same symbols differently. Moreover, an annotator's use of symbols is often influenced by the player's strength: a positional misjudgment that an annotator might give a "??" if played by a strong grandmaster might pass unremarked if played by a beginner.

Annotators' use of punctuation also may possibly be influenced by the result of the game (regardless of the actual quality of the move); one possible example came in the 11th game of the 1972 World Championship, when Spassky played an unexpected move, 14.Nb1, retreating the knight to its initial square. Spassky won the game, and several annotators gave the move two exclamation points. Edmar Mednis asserted that if Spassky had lost the game, the move would likely have been given two question marks instead.

Computer chess

Computer chess is computer architecture encompassing hardware and software capable of playing chess autonomously without human guidance. Computer chess acts as solo entertainment (allowing players to practice and to better themselves when no sufficiently strong human opponents are available), as aids to chess analysis, for computer chess competitions, and as research to provide insights into human cognition.

Current chess engines are able to defeat even the strongest human players under normal conditions. Whether computation could ever solve chess remains an open question.

Availability

Chess-playing computers are now accessible to the average consumer. From the mid-1970s to the present day, dedicated chess computers have been available for purchase. There are many chess engines such as Stockfish, Crafty, Fruit and GNU Chess that can be downloaded from the Internet for free. These engines are able to play a game that, when run on an up-to-date personal computer, can defeat most master players under tournament conditions. Top programs such as the proprietary Shredder or Fritz or the open source program Stockfish have surpassed even world champion caliber players at blitz and short time controls. In October 2008 Rybka was rated top in the CCRL,CEGT, CSS,SSDF, and WBEC rating lists and has won many recent official computer chess tournaments such as CCT 8 and 9, the 2006 Dutch Open Computer Championship, the 16th IPCCC, and the 15th World Computer Chess Championship. As of February 03, 2016, Stockfish is the top rated chess program on the IPON rating list.