Alekhine's Triple Queen Sacrifice

Alexander Alekhine chose this last round win over Efim Bogoljubov at Hastings 1922 for his own collection, My Best Games of Chess 1908 to 1923, one of only a handful of games he considered good enough to select himself. Andrew Soltis later rated it among the four best games of the entire twentieth century.

The game is remembered for its finish rather than its opening: Alekhine lets his queen be captured on e8, then pushes connected passed pawns down the board, promoting new queens twice more, each of which is captured in turn, before a fourth queen is about to appear when Bogoljubov finally resigned. No pawn is captured until move 24, an unusually long build-up before the fireworks begin.

The game score itself is unusually well corroborated across independent sources, with only a single minor discrepancy (one source gives White's 51st move as Ke2 rather than Kf2); the version used here follows the majority reading, matched independently by a structured player database.