Topalov v Shirov, Linares 1998: 47...Bh3!!

Alexei Shirov played this game against Veselin Topalov in round 10 of the Linares tournament on 4 March 1998. It is remembered for one move, 47...Bh3, in an ending with bishops of opposite colours, the kind of ending that is famous for being drawn. John Emms ranked it first in his book The Most Amazing Chess Moves of All Time, and Tim Krabbé ranked it second on his list of the most fantastic moves.

The whole game

Shirov played the Grünfeld Defence and took a lot of risks as Black. The game was far from one-sided before the ending.

What Stockfish makes of it

We had Stockfish check every move.

26.Bd2: a win missed

With 24.e5 and 25.f5 White's pawns were rolling, and Stockfish finds that 26.Rf3 would have left White more than three pawns better. Topalov played 26.Bd2, and the game was level again. Later, 37.Bh6 let Black take the advantage; 37.Bf6 would have held the balance.

47...Bh3!!: the bishop goes

Black is two pawns up, but with bishops of opposite colours, White's king only needs to reach e3 or d4 to build a fortress. 47...Bh3 gives up the bishop so that Black's king can get to f5 and e4 first. After that, White's bishop can't stop both the d-pawn and the a-pawn.

Daniel Naroditsky showed that it is the only way to win: other bishop moves are a tempo too slow, and White holds. Stockfish agrees exactly: after 47...Bh3 Black is about five pawns better, while every other move leaves Black only slightly better, not enough to win. Even declining the bishop doesn't help White: 48.Kf2 Kf5 is just as bad. Shirov had played the same idea seven years earlier, according to Gregory Serper.

How we checked

• The moves are from chessmotion.com and firechess.com, which agree; the ending from move 43 is confirmed by Wikipedia's page on Alexei Shirov and other sources. No Wikipedia, ChessBase or Winter page we found prints the full score. We replayed every move with python-chess: all are legal.
• The engine: Stockfish 16.1 checked every move at depth 22, and the key moments again at depth 26 to 28. "A pawn better" is Stockfish's measure of the position, not a count of material.
• The history and the named opinions are from The Week in Chess, Wikipedia, ChessBase and Chess.com (Naroditsky's analysis of the ending and Serper's article).

More famous games

• The Immortal Game
• The Evergreen Game
• The Opera Game
• Zukertort v Blackburne, London 1883
• Lasker v Bauer, Amsterdam 1889
• Steinitz v von Bardeleben, Hastings 1895
• Rotlewi v Rubinstein, Łódź 1907
• Levitsky v Marshall, Breslau 1912
• Edward Lasker v Thomas, London 1912
• Lasker v Capablanca, St Petersburg 1914
• Capablanca v Marshall, New York 1918
• Adams v Torre, 1920
• The Immortal Zugzwang Game
• Réti v Alekhine, Baden-Baden 1925
• Euwe v Alekhine, 1935, game 26
• Botvinnik v Capablanca, AVRO 1938
• The Game of the Century
• Polugaevsky v Nezhmetdinov, Sochi 1958
• Tal v Smyslov, Candidates 1959
• Spassky v Bronstein, 1960
• Tal v Botvinnik, 1960, game 1
• Robert Byrne v Fischer, 1963
• Petrosian v Spassky, 1966, game 10
• Spassky v Petrosian, 1969, game 19
• Larsen v Spassky, Belgrade 1970
• Fischer v Spassky, 1972, game 6
• Karpov v Spassky, 1974, game 9
• Liu Wenzhe v Donner, 1978
• Karpov v Kasparov, 1985, game 16
• Kasparov v Karpov, Seville 1987, game 24
• Shirov v Judit Polgár, Buenos Aires 1994
• Kasparov's Immortal
• Kasparov v Kramnik, 2000, game 3
• Kramnik v Leko, Brissago 2004, game 14
• Anand's Immortal
• Anand v Carlsen, Chennai 2013, game 9
• Wei Yi v Bruzón, Danzhou 2015
• Carlsen v Karjakin, 2016, tiebreak game 4
• Carlsen v Nepomniachtchi, 2021, game 6

Ways to train

• Chess tactics trainer
• Chess blunder trainer
• Chess pawn structures
• Chess endgame trainer
• Positional chess training
• Analyse your chess games
• Master moves