Bishops Do Not Retreat!

Some time ago, I wrote an article with a similar title where we discussed a sacrifice that happens when Black plays h7-h6 and attacks White's Ng5, but instead of moving the knight back, White plays Ng5xf7! starting an attack.

Today we'll analyze a similar pattern where the attacked bishop doesn't retreat and instead gets sacrificed. I guess we can find hundreds of games where one of the opponents ignores a threat to his bishop. This is one of the most notorious games:

It is a well-known fact that this game belongs to this series of articles: Part 1, Part II, Part III and Part IV.

In this article we are going to analyze a particular case where a bishop pins a knight and when Black tries to break the pin by playing ...h7-h6 and after Bg5-h4 g7-g5, expecting the Bh4 to completely abandon the pin, White completely ignores the threat.

The following well-known game is an excellent example. The famous Soviet grandmaster Alexander Kotov wrote a classical book "Play Like a Grandmaster," so here you have a chance to play like him:

You can notice that even after Black broke the pin by playing 14...g5, the bishop didn't move and still was putting pressure along the diagonal, which allowed White to bring his knight into attack by Nf4!! 

Here is another golden oldie:

Finally, let me show you a very recent example:

Remember: when your opponent tries to break a pin and plays g7-g5 attacking your bishop, it doesn't automatically mean that the bishop must move!