The Tactic That Catches World Champions

Have you ever played against a grandmaster in a chess game? How long did you survive? If you lasted more than than 12 moves, then you did better than former world champion GM Anatoly Karpov in his roughest game, against GM Larry Christiansen. See if you can find the move that made the chess legend resign.

12.Qd1 was a deadly fork, attacking the h5-knight and d6-bishop. Karpov resigned immediately. 

World champions don't typically blunder a piece in the opening, but backward moves are easy to miss. Another one of Karpov's most famous losses featured another surprising retreat that decided the game. Can you spot why Karpov resigned in the position below? What would Black play next after White captures the knight with the h-pawn?

White resigned because after the forced capture on g3, there's no good defense against Black's retreat Ra8! followed by Rh8#, a beautiful rook maneuver. 

Because chess players are so trained to focus on aggressive attacking moves, it's easy for us to miss powerful retreats. Karpov wasn't always the victim of backward moves—sometimes his prestigious opponents overlooked his backward ideas as well.

True to his style, Karpov's famous retreats were mostly positional in nature. In their first world championship match, GM Garry Kasparov overlooked a strong retreat from Karpov in this position. He had only counted on the obvious recapture 47.gxh4.

Instead, Karpov found 47.Ng2!!, a temporary pawn sacrifice to open the kingside. A few moves later he had won back his pawn and went on to win the game.

Karpov also surprised another world champion, GM Boris Spassky, with a powerful retreating move. See if you can spot his plan in the game below.

The modern superstar GM Magnus Carlsen has studied his classics. Check out how he used a powerful backward maneuver to take down his predecessor as champion, GM Viswanathan Anand.

Have you found any strong backward moves in your own games? Let us know in the comments!