Can Stockfish See THIS Move? - Yuri Gusev's Immortal Positional Queen Sacrifice
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 peaked with a classical Elo rating of 2380, making him the equivalent of a FIDE Master in terms of strength, although it is not clear what title he ultimately achieved. As of December 2022, it is unknown if he is still alive.
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. 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. 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 on his setup, while Stockfish was unable to find the sacrifice despite calculating more than 600 million nodes using powerful cloud analysis.[4] It wasn't until the release of Stockfish 15 in 2022 that it immediately suggested the queen sacrifice, 76 years after the original game; however, Stockfish 15.1 inexplicably ceases to find the move to at least depth 86 after searching more than 47.4 billion nodes. Conversely, Stockfish 15 NNUE finds the move after just a few seconds.
While Gusev's queen sacrifice was indeed proved to be the best move by comprehensive human and 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. Had Gusev and Auerbach played the objectively best moves at every point after his brilliancy, the game would still be a victory for White.
Grandmaster Simon Williams called Gusev's Immortal one of the most beautiful ideas that he had ever seen.
Gusev appeared to play his last recorded game in 1999 at 77 years old at the Efim Geller Memorial.
PGN OF THE GAME:
[Site "Chelyabinsk URS"]
[EventDate "?"]
[Round "5"]
[PlyCount "73"]
[White "Yuri S Gusev"]
[BlackElo "?"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[Black "E Auerbach"]
[Result "1-0"]
[Event "Molniya Sporting Society"]
[Date "1946.??.??"]
[ECO "B72"]
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
( 24. Qa3 Rxe6 25. Qxa7 Qe7 26. Qa8+ Qe8 27. Qa7 Re7 28. Qxb6 Kf7 29. Qb3+ Re6 30. Qb7+ Qe7 31. Qxe7+ Kxe7 32. Be3 )
24... fxe5 25. Rf1 Rc8 26. Bd1 Rc4 27. Bb3 b5 28. Bxc4
( 28. a4 a6 29. h4 Qe7 ( 29... g5 ) 30. Kg2 Qe8 31. Rf2 Qe7 32. Ba2 Qe8 33. b4 Qe7 34. Bb3 Qe8 35. axb5 axb5 36. Bxc4 )
28... bxc4 29. b3 a5
( 29... cxb3 30. axb3 a5 31. c4 g5 32. c5 a4 33. bxa4 Qe7 34. c6 Qa3 )
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
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