Kasparov's Immortal · 1999
83% of club players play Bxc4 here — and it throws away 2.9 pawns
7r/1R3p1p/6p1/1p6/2q5/5PP1/1Q1r3P/1K1k1B2 w - - 6 3783% of players rated around 1500 play Bxc4
in this position. It is the natural move, and it is not the best one.
| Move | Played by | Evaluation |
|---|---|---|
Bxc4 the reflex | 83% of 1500-rated humans | +0 centipawns |
Rd7 the move | 1% | +289 centipawns |
The difference is 2.9 pawns — a pin (the rook on d2 is pinned).
How this was checked
The evaluations are Stockfish. The human percentages are
Maia, a neural network trained on millions of human games and
conditioned on rating — so 83% of players around 1500
is a measurement of what people
actually do, not an estimate of what they might. Any tactical motif named above is verified against
the board geometry rather than described.
Paste a chess.com game you played and ChessCast makes a 10-20 minute coaching podcast about it — two hosts on the audio, and a board that moves in lock-step so you can watch the moment it turned. Every claim is checked against Stockfish before it is spoken.