Game Ending X-Ray Attack

The game of chess has a rich and historical vernacular including terms like Zugzwang(Robert Brieger on high alert, seance required), skewer, tempo, fork, transpose, squeeze, pin, interpose, triangulate, opposition, etc.

The following game played at the internet chess club illustrates another entry in the Royal Game's very dense lexicon. Monkjunk, playing out of the United Kingdom, just played Qe7 on the black side of a Catalan opening expecting a quite drawish Rook and Pawn end game.

Little did the British player, with the sacrilegious user name, realize he had just walked face first into a tactical theme that was covered in Jeremy Silman's classic middle game work How to Reassess your Chess. The tactic is aptly named X-Ray attack because, in some sense, the attacking piece is "seeing through" one piece to attack another piece or square in this case.

In the diagrammed position, the Black Queen is X-Rayed to to the unoccupied d8 square which makes the winning move of Rd8 a no brainer for any veteran chess player familiar with the multitude of tactical patterns our beloved game enjoys.

Back to the ICC handle monkjunk. A monk is an individual who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of other monks. Asceticism means to live a self denying, austere sort of life, so one can only surmise that this chess player is not a monk, a monk on the way out, or being disrespectful to monks....... Come to think of it chess players are typically a bunch of guys who hang out with each other for long weekends to get away from their wives.....Hmmm food for thought.