The Elephant Trap
Posted on March 2nd, 2008 by Chess Teacher
The Elephant Trap is a famous trap in the Queen’s Gambit Declined. I am not sure why it is called the Elephant Trap, but the name reminds me to an oil painting of Eddie William Powell. The picture above shows a part of this painting. More information about this and other paintings of this artist can be found at this website.
But OK, let’s continue with the trap.
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Elephant_Trap |
It seems that the knight is pinned, but White should have sticked to something like 6.e3
6… Nxd5! Black just captures the knight 7.Bxd8 and White takes the queen. At this moment it turns out that after the check 7...Bb4+ White has only one legal move 8.Qd2 Bxd2+ 9.Kxd2 Kxd8 and Black has won a piece *
in Russia, the “bishop” is known by the Russian word for elephant.
probably the trap’s name is related to move, bishop (elephant) to b-4.