Tigran Petrosian's Positional Exchange Sacrifices

Photo from Chessdom

"I repeat, that the first and main difficulty in making a positional exchange sacrifice is a psychological caution: after all, you have to give up a rook for a minor piece. The second difficulty is that the exchange is given up when this is not forced by circumstances. Therefore you must anticipate beforehand, in good time, how events will develop and take the necessary measures." 

- Tigran Petrosian

by Junta

In a training session with a student last night, we were looking at one of Petrosian's games (a loss against Fischer), when I mentioned that one of the things he was known for was his positional exchange sacrifices.

Compiling a database of such games later, the first hit on a Google search gave me this game collection on Chessgames.com, and for the next hour I was amazed to discover (or be reminded of) just how many beautiful games involving positional exchange sacrifices Petrosian had left with us (and of course, there must be even more). I'd seen a lot of them (especially the PES moments) before from various books, but to play through these entire games one after another felt like rediscovering an old hobby.

I was reminded once again of the class of past champions - make sure you check the collection out! In the upcoming Petrosian Memorial, it would be sweet to see a game with a winning positional exchange sacrifice, as a tribute to this unique strength of his.