Yuri Gusev
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Yuri Semyonovich Gusev (born September 25, 1921 – ?) is a Soviet chess player and was a Merited Master of Sport of the USSR (1951). He is also a former radio engineer.
Gusev was a participant in many championships in Moscow, including semi-finals of the championship of the USSR (best results: XIX: 4–6, XXII: 6–7). In 1948, he drew a match with Ilya Kan.
A game in 1946, known as Gusev's Immortal, included a positional queen sacrifice against E Auerbach at Molniya Sporting Society, and it was featured as Game of the Day on chessgames.com on October 11, 2011.[1] The game itself was not part of a major competition, but Gusev's Immortal has been brought from obscurity in the 21st century and has been widely recognized for its long-term strategic brilliance. The queen sacrifice itself is not noticed as a good idea by most of the strongest engines unless run to extreme depths, with one user in the comments section of a 2012 YouTube video in 2020 stating it took Stockfish 11 (the strongest engine at the time) six hours and 48 minutes at Depth 73/49 to recommend the queen sacrifice and see that it was winning by +4.07.[2] On the other hand, in a different video, from 2020, the chess YouTuber Suren Chess discovered that it took Leela Chess Zero (a chess engine that uses neural networks for greater positional understanding) just eight seconds, while Stockfish was unable to find the sacrifice despite calculating more than 600 million nodes using powerful cloud analysis.[3] It wasn't until the release of Stockfish 15 in 2022 that it immediately suggested the queen sacrifice, 76 years after the original game.
While Gusev's queen sacrifice was indeed proved to be the best move by retrograde computer analysis, there was speculation that a defensive resource near the end of the game Gusev played where his opponent could have formed a fortress to draw the game, but such a defence (in addition to an alternative line that would have cemented the win) was only found in 2011, 65 years later after the original game, thanks to an investigation by the user Vass on chesspub.com.[4][5]
Grandmaster Simon Williams called Gusev's Immortal one of the most beautiful ideas that he had ever seen.[6]
[Event "Molniya Sporting Society"]
[Site "Chelyabinsk URS"]
[Date "1946.??.??"]
[EventDate "?"]
[Round "5"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Yuri S Gusev"]
[Black "E Auerbach"]
[ECO "B72"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]
[PlyCount "73"]
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be2 Nc6 7.Nb3
Bg7 8.O-O Be6 9.f4 Rc8 10.f5 Bd7 11.g4 Ne5 12.g5 Ng8 13.Nd5 f6
14.Be3 b6 15.Nd4 Kf7 16.c3 Qe8 17.Ne6 Bxe6 18.fxe6+ Kf8
19.Nxf6 Nxf6 20.gxf6 Bxf6 21.Bh6+ Kg8 22.Rxf6 exf6 23.Qxd6 Rc6
24.Qxe5 fxe5 25.Rf1 Rc8 26.Bd1 Rc4 27.Bb3 b5 28.Bxc4 bxc4
29.b3 a5 30.bxc4 Qe7 31.Kg2 Qa3 32.Rf2 Qe7 33.Rf1 g5 34.Rf5 g4
35.c5 Qd8 36.c6 Qe7 37.c7 1-0
References
- ^ "Yuri Gusev vs E Auerbach (1946) Gusev's Immortal". 2022-02-20. Archived from the original on 20 February 2022. Retrieved 2022-03-26.
- ^ Brilliant Chess Game: Positional Queen Sacrifice! - Gusev vs Averbakh - Moscow 1946 (Chessworld.net), retrieved 2022-03-26
- ^ Queen Sacrifice Made 74 Years Ago Is Still A Headache For Stockfish And Leela Chess Zero, retrieved 2022-03-26
- ^ "ChessPub Forum - My trusty engine tells me Chess Truth". www.chesspub.com. Retrieved 2022-03-26.
- ^ Copeland (SamCopeland), Sam. "The Spectacular Winning Queen Sacrifice Chess Computers Don't Understand - Gusev vs. Auerbach, 1946". Chess.com. Retrieved 2022-03-26.
- ^ James, Andrew. "The Craziest Game of Chess Ever? - GingerGM Simon Williams". www.ichess.net. Retrieved 2022-03-26.