* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_Game The Immortal Game]], played 21 June 1851. Two of the greatest chess players in the world, Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky, sat down for a casual game during a break in a tournament. Anderssen then proceeds to sacrifice a pawn, a bishop, ''both rooks'', and then his ''queen'' ... to checkmate with three minor pieces in twenty-three moves.
** The last moves of this game were used in ''{{Film/Blade Runner}}''.
** This game is so iconic that other great games are often called "[player name]'s Immortal" or use the adjective "immortal" in some other way -- for examples of which, see the rest of this page.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Game The Opera Game]]: In 1858, seven years after the Immortal Game, the American master player Paul Morphy visited Paris, where he was invited to the opera by the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard. Both being fairly good chess players in their own right, they decided to challenge Morphy to a game of chess. As it was bad form to refuse such a challenge, Morphy accepted, even though he would rather watch the opera he came for. Going for as short a game as possible, he checkmated his cooperating opponents in only seventeen moves... after which he resumed watching the opera performance. To this day, the Opera Game is routinely shown to students as a lesson in [[StraightForTheCommander the value of rapid development and seizing the initiative in chess]].
* Bobby Fischer had many, starting with [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_the_Century_(chess) The Game of the Century]], a brilliancy[[note]]chess slang for "crowning game of awesome"[[/note]] won against grandmaster Donald Byrne in 1956—''when Fischer was thirteen''.
* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babson_task Babson task]] is a "White to play and mate" problem in which Black can promote a pawn, and whichever piece he promotes to, White ''must'' promote to the same kind of piece. But it sounds impossible. After all, why should White have to promote to a rook or bishop when a queen is more powerful? Even if the knight can make moves the queen cannot, why should White's knight promotion be determined by a promotion at the other end of the board? Pierre Drumare worked on composing such a task for ''twenty years'' before coming to the conclusion that it was impossible. The problem of creating a Babson task was solved in 1983 by Leonid Yarosh, hitherto a complete unknown in the chess problem world. He subsequently bettered this achievement by creating a version with a "perfect" non-capturing key. [[note]]In chess problems, it is an aesthetic demerit for the key to be a capture, since such moves are more obvious to solvers.[[/note]] And there was a happy ending for Drumare, who subsequently succeeded in composing his own Babson task, albeit one with certain aesthetic flaws compared to Yarosh's. In fact, over a dozen Babsons have been composed since then, and Yarosh's is still seen as the best.
* Deep Blue versus Kasparov. Whether it is more awesome that someone could [[GadgeteerGenius build a robot that could take on Kasparov]] or that [[TheChessmaster Kasparov could manage to take on a super-robot]], you decide.
* In December 2017, almost exactly 20 years after Deep Blue, [[https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match the neural network-based [=AlphaZero=] completely dominated Stockfish 8]]. To give some perspective on how impressive this is: [=AlphaZero=] beat Stockfish, one of the strongest chess engines in the world at the time (and over 1000 Elo points higher than Deep Blue), after teaching itself how to play for four hours with no outside input beyond the rules of the game.
** Google declined to pursue [=AlphaZero=] any further than the paper they released on how it works, so the Internet took the paper and built an AI based on the paper. Known as [[https://github.com/glinscott/leela-chess Leela chess Zero]], it built up to phenomenal strength during its first six months, being able to occasionally beat the strongest conventional engines in the world at the time such as Stockfish 9. Its rapid progress led many to estimate that the program would be the strongest chess player in the world by the end of 2018. Leela is considered remarkable due to its inclination toward positional play, similar to [=AlphaZero=]. While its tactical play is of a lower quality than that of many of its opponents, its strategic depth puts other systems to shame and often compensates for its shortcomings.
* The Turk, a supposedly robotic chess player that toured the courts of Europe in the eighteenth century and convinced people that it really ''was'' an eighteenth-century robot that could play chess. There were endless theories about how it might work, fueled by ingenious design elements that concealed its real "mechanism": a human player inside. The player could tell which pieces were moved by a system of magnets; when a piece was lifted up, the magnet under that square would fall, and when it was put down again, the magnet on the new square would rise. See [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk the other wiki]] for more, including the Turk's legendary match with Napoleon!
* Any checkmate, in formal or informal play at any skill level, where a pawn delivers the final blow.
* Simultaneously forking an enemy king, queen and rook with one's knight. Generally, it's objectively no better than a normal fork, but it's cool nonetheless.
* No consensus exists on the topic of the greatest game ever played, but [[http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1011478 Kasparov's Immortal]] is a popular choice among chess aficionados.
* Nobody taught Capablanca to play chess. He learned the moves by watching his father play with a friend, and he played his first game because he spotted his father illegally moving his knight two squares diagonally like a bishop. Teased by his son for cheating, Papa Capa crustily told him that he didn't even know how to play the game. So they set the pieces up, and Capablanca won the first game he ever played. Later, he was taken to the local chess club and matched up against a proper player, who very kindly gave the untrained four-year-old a queen start. Capablanca [[http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1481959&kpage=1 hosed]] him.
* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_Losing_Game Immortal Losing Game]] was this for both David Bronstein and Bogdan Śliwa: Bronstein for setting up an entire ''series'' of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swindle_%28chess%29 swindles]] from a seemingly lost position, and Śliwa for successfully avoiding each and every one of them.
* Just about any move marked with a double exclamation mark (!!) qualifies, especially those that lead to checkmate, since annotation mark is specifically meant to be awarded to any move the annotator finds brilliant. Some ! moves also count.
* In 1982, during a chess awareness publicity tour stop in Orlando, Florida, then-US Open Chess Champion Andrew Soltis invited a randomly selected twelve-year-old boy named Aaron Butler up onto the stage from the crowd to play against Soltis in an exhibition game. The idea was that Soltis would teach the boy (and the crowd) to play chess. Butler then proceeded to beat Soltis in two moves via a combination of moves called the Fool's Mate, which one can assume happened only with Soltis's active cooperation. When asked about it later, the boy said, "It just seemed like the right thing to do."
* Some chess masters enjoy giving simultaneous exhibitions, events where they play many opponents at once (usually amateurs). Others like to play blindfold chess, picturing the game in their heads. Many amazing records have been set over the years, but the crown probably belongs to Reuben Fine, grandmaster and psychoanalyst; in 1945, Fine played four simultaneous blindfold ''rapid-transit'' (ten seconds per move) games and won them all! The icing on the cake: one of his opponents was Robert Byrne, himself a brilliant player who would go on to be US champion.
* A member of the chess website Lichess, [=MoralIntentions=], has a few:
** They played [[http://en.lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/the-alphabet-of-chess 26 games of chess]] against a handicapped AI where the final board positions both are checkmates and display one of the letters of the alphabet.
** They have also managed the feat of promoting all eight of their pawns to [[http://en.lichess.org/Xr6mVHGU rooks]], to [[http://en.lichess.org/QhseQsbc/black bishops]], to [[http://en.lichess.org/i9EeG6yj/black knights]], and to [[http://en.lichess.org/IkrKHguO queens]].
* Any game where a grandmaster finds a way to recover from a major screw-up.
* Chess teacher George Koltanowski told the following story: He was teaching the rules of chess to a new student, who asked to play a game immediately. George was about to checkmate the student on the next move, but the student, surprisingly, promoted a pawn to a king! George had forgotten to inform the student of the restriction and had to stick to his own rule, so he played a move that checkmated ''both'' kings simultaneously!
** In one version of the story, he promotes his own pawn into a king ''of his opponent's colour'' and proceeds to mate all three in one move!
* After Kasparov's Immortal, a new chess game known as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World Kasparov versus the World]] took place over the Internet in 1999. Garry Kasparov took on a team of over 50,000 people from 75 different countries ''and won''. Excellent moves were played throughout by both sides, and the game was more or less even right up until the end. In fact, the only reason that the World Team was unable to force a draw was because, at the time, there were no seven-piece endgame tablebases.
* "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxkzbLKnl8A The Windmill]]", a 1925 game where Carlos Torre Repetto defeated former world champion Emanuel Lasker by sacrificing his queen to enable his rook and bishop to decimate all of Lasker's other pieces, with Lasker helpless to stop it as his king kept getting put in inescapable check.
* "The Golden Move": An utterly brilliant queen sacrifice played by American Frank Marshall in [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitsky_versus_Marshall his game against Levitsky]] in Breslau 1912. The black queen can be captured in three different ways, yet White is lost.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_1914_chess_tournament Lasker vs Capablanca]] from the great 1914 tournament in St. Petersburg is perhaps the greatest example of psychological warfare in chess. Reigning World Champion Lasker had to win against the near-unbeatable Capablanca, but to Capablanca's surprise, Lasker opened the game very peacefully, giving every indication that he was playing for a draw. Thinking that Lasker had settled for second place, Capablanca relaxed - and did not notice the crushing attack Lasker was preparing until it was too late.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lasker#Notable_games Edward Lasker vs. Sir George Thomas]] in London 1912, a borderline HumiliationConga summarized by Thomas with the words "This was very nice." Lasker (not to be confused with world champion Emanuel Lasker) ended the game within 18 moves with a queen sacrifice into a series of checks that ''drags the black king all the way across the board into his own back rank'' and then delivers checkmate [[CherryTapping by moving his king]]. The general consensus among chess fans is that the only way the game could've been more awesome for Lasker is if he checkmated by castling.
* Emanuel Lasker faced off against Edward Lasker in the sixth round of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_1924_chess_tournament New York 1924 tournament]], one of the strongest of its time. [[https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1272756 The game]] lasted an epic 103 moves each (a typical game lasts more like 40 each), took fourteen hours over three sessions to complete, and featured missed winning chances for both sides. In the end it was ''Emanuel'', the former world champion, who, in a seemingly lost position, forced a near-miraculous draw with a lone knight and king against a king, rook, and pawn -- beforehand it was thought that such a position would always be lost with correct play.
* [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaskett%27s_Puzzle Plaskett’s puzzle]] was shown to a group of grandmasters at a tournament, none of whom could solve it. Then one of them, Mikhail Tal, went for a walk, had a EurekaMoment, and rushed back with the solution. Even once chess engines surpassed human grandmasters they were unable to solve the position. This lasted until around 2015, now engines can find a mate in 41 moves despite a flaw in the original solution.
* The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQuPYiJq1A Immortal Sacrifice Game]] went further than even Morphy or Anderssen would dream. Greg Serper sacrificed [[WeHaveReserves every single piece he ever controlled]] (including promoted pawns—yes, he sacrificed a queen thrice!) and still managed to win, obtaining more control of the board than probably any player in history.
* The Legal Trap, which allows you to sacrifice ''a queen'' and still win in less than ten moves.
* Awesome moments are not always winning. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sew_n0SDjT0 One online player]] managed to make a move so bad that it wraps around the world and becomes unironically amazing in spite of itself. After trading advantage back and forth with their opponent for the entire game, they wind up in a position where they can deliver checkmate on their next move. They can deliver ''check'' with their bishop in two different ways, but only one of them wins. The other ''loses by force'' (that is, after playing it the opponent's only remaining legal move is [[SurpriseCheckmate to deliver checkmate]].) They play the wrong one, but in doing so, [[NecessaryFail goes down in history]]. The chance that a similar position will occur again in an organic game where both sides are sincerely trying to win is so microscopic that the player deserves some praise despite losing. And when asked, they said they truly didn't see the opponent's mate in 1, and [[AssumedWin thought they'd won]].
* While it's most common between rookies, successfully executing a Scholar's mate or a Fool's mate is a very good way to humilitate the opponent in four moves or two respectively.
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