1/21/2021 – In the past, many tournaments offered brilliancy prizes for particularly beautiful games, but unfortunately this fine custom has gone a little out of fashion. But the FIDE Online Cadet and Youth World Championships 2020 paid respect to this tradition and awarded a brilliancy prize. It was donated by the Russian company Gazprom, and it was won by 16-year old Indian prodigy Nihal Sarin for an impressive game full of sacrifices and unexpected moves. | Photo: Nihal Sarin (ChessBase India)
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Sac, sac, attack
Nihal Sarin, born on July 13, 2004 is considered one of the world's greatest talents. He became a grandmaster at age 14, and at the same age jumped the mark of 2600 Elo-points. Only two players had ever achieved this at the age of 14: John Burke from the USA and Wei Yi from China.
However, Burke's achievement was partly due to the peculiarities of the Elo-system. In July 2015 the American had a rating of 2258, but after a series of very good results and thanks to a K-factor of 40 he had jumped to a rating of 2603 in August 2015. At the moment Burke has a rating of 2522 and is almost 100 points behind Nihal Sarin, who currently comes to 2620 rating points.
In December 2020, the young Indian celebrated another success. He won the U18 group in the FIDE Online Cadets and Youth World Championships. His game against Francesco Sonis was particularly spectacular and brought Nihal Sarin the Gazprom Brilliancy Prize.
Nine well-known YouTube chess streamers had been asked for their vote, and five of them were particularly impressed by Nihal's stunning sacrificial attack.
Replay the game:
On his YouTube channel, Daniel King, one of the judges, took a closer look at this brilliancy.
Nihal Sarin is not only a brilliant attacker, he also knows something about the endgame. Which he showed when he was a guest in two of Karsten Müller's Endgame Magic Shows.
Endgame Magic, February 25, 2020: Guests: Nihal Sarin and Srinath Naranyan
You can watch these shows on-demand with a ChessBase account. Don't have an account? You can register a free 90-day account to watch!
Endgame Magic, May 14, 2019: Guest: GM Nihal Sarin
Johannes FischerJohannes Fischer was born in 1963 in Hamburg and studied English and German literature in Frankfurt. He now lives as a writer and translator in Nürnberg. He is a FIDE-Master and regularly writes for KARL, a German chess magazine focusing on the links between culture and chess. On his own blog he regularly publishes notes on "Film, Literature and Chess".
In this video course experts examine the games of Bent Larsen. Let them show you which openings Larsen chose, where his strength in middlegames were, how he outplayed his opponents in the endgame & you’ll get a glimpse of his tactical abilities!
From the 2026 Candidates Tournament, featuring a video review by Dorian Rogozenco, to Jan Werle’s opening video on the French Tarrasch Defence, and Oliver Reeh’s tactical column ‘Top Grandmasters at Work’. Analyses by Giri, So, Wei Yi and many others.
You will learn how Black's dynamic piece activity and structural counterplay more than compensate for White's extra tempo in the colour-reversed setups.
In this course, you’ll learn how to take the initiative against the London and prevent White from comfortably playing their usual system by playing 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bf4 Nh5.
London System Powerbase 2026 is a database and contains in all 11 285 games from Mega 2026 and the Correspondence Database 2026, of which 282 are annotated.
The London System Powerbook 2026 is based on more than 410 000 games or game fragments from different opening moves and ECO codes; what they all have in common is that White plays d4 and Bf4 but does not play c4.
In this course, Grandmaster Elisabeth Pähtz presents the London System, a structured and ambitious approach based on the immediate Bf4, leading to rich and dynamic positions.
€59.90
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