Hello friends, I am new in this community, my name is Miguel Angel, I am 27 years old, and I have just discovered this community, I am a chess fan and I like to analyse the games in order to correct mistakes and learn. I want to share with you today a topic that I have decided to call, "The Importance of the Variations". Without further ado we begin.

For this short analysis we will use a game played in 1924 between Gibaud versus Lazard two grandmasters of the time, and in fact this game went down in history as the shortest since in only four moves the white pieces surrender. Here it is important that we learn how essential it is to know the variants of the moves, as many will know the Mate of the crazy is the shortest, however, in this opportunity it extends to some more moves since it presents a variant that we are going to study next.

Gibaud (White) - Lazard (Black)

In the first move everything is normal, White opens with D4 and Black responds with Knight F6 and so far the game is even.

In the next move White plays Knight D2 and Black responds with E5 offering that pawn since here Lazard begins to develop a strategy taking advantage of the fact that the Knight in D2 obstructs the exit of the Alfil of C1.

Then White captures the pawn in E5 and attacks the Knight in F6, but Black takes his knight to the square in G4, since if he returns it to its initial square he will have a lesser piece and he will be left with a very bad situation to develop his game. Besides, taking that knight to G4 has a hidden cell and is to urge White to attack it with the pawn of H2, in this way the exit of the Bishop of C1 would still be obstructed.

White falls in the cell and attacks that horse with H3, then the black horse goes to the box of E3. At this point White surrenders and I think many of you will know why.

White has two options:

The first is, Capture that horse and lose by checkmate.

The second is to make any other move like G3 to avoid the black lady going to H4 and losing the white lady.

In any of the two options White loses the game.

It is understood by Variant, which is a move derived from some technique but carried out with different order at the moment of moving the pieces or capturing them.

When we are initiating in chess we learn routine moves and we obviate to study the variants of those moves, in this game that I show you Gibaud overlooked that he was playing a variant of Mate de loco, although it is true, in that time the theory was not so studied as now but we must learn from those oversights to improve our game.

Mate of the crazy.

This matte can be used with both white and black pieces, in the GIF image I show them with the white pieces.

The game I showed you ended up with a variant of this mate, which although it looks a bit childish, it is normal that we try to learn it when we are starting in chess.
I hope you like this first post in the community, I will be uploading more analysis concerning the wonderful world of chess, thanks, greetings and a big hug.