Hikaru's Super Moves

Hikaru Nakamura was a chess prodigy, like Magnus Carlsen and some others such as Paul Morphy and Jose Capablanca. He became a national master of the United States at only ten years old! That was a record at the time. He also broke Bobby Fischer's record by becoming a grandmaster when he was only 15 years old!

Now he has won two championships of the United States and is one of the highest rated players in the world. Like the article "Magnus' Marvelous Moves" we will be seeing some combinations from his games.

First, a pretty easy one which was from a "blitz" game. Blitz is fast chess (usually five minutes for each side). Nakamura is an expert in blitz chess.

Good players see if the king and queen are "forking distance" in less than a second! And the fork is supported by a pin - the knight cannot be captured by Black's knight, because it is pinned.

Let's see another one. Black's bishop is very strong on d5 and White's pieces have to defend the f3 pawn. But how is Nakamura going to break through White's fortress? The rook on f2 is guarding the f3 pawn and the b2 pawn. Aha...an overworked piece. We know what to do...

 

White could not take the rook because then f3 would not be guarded enough, so Black would play ...Bxf3+ and win the queen by a fork. This meant that Hikaru won a crucial pawn and also broke through with the rook. Black won in another few moves.

In our next one, the game was pretty much even until Black, last move made a terrible blunder, 27...Ra8-b8. How did Nakamura take advantage of it? See if you can see what he saw.

Black resigned after that move, because if the king takes back, then Bf4+ will win the rook by a skewer. So he will be a piece down against a grandmaster - which is not much hope.

Here is one last one. It is hard to solve, so it is not a problem, I am just showing you the solution. Nakamura was only twelve years old when he played this game!

A queen sacrifice is one of the most amazing things in chess. When you let your opponent take the most powerful piece, you have to be pretty sure you judged things right. Because if you are wrong - then you are just down a queen and will lose for sure!