Desperado (chess) Desperado (chess) In chess, a desperado piece is a piece that is or trapped, but captures an enemy piece before it is itself captured. This can be in either a situation where both sides have pieces, "...in which you use your doomed piece to eat as much material as possible before it dies"; or alternatively a sacrifice that will result in stalemate if it is captured. A simple example illustrating the first definition comes from a 1958 game between future World Champions Tigran Petrosian and Bobby Fischer (see diagram). White had just captured the e5-pawn with his knight on f3.
Empress (chess) attacking archbishop two squares diagonally away), while the rook+knight compound cannot. Worse, the word empress suggests a piece stronger than the queen, while this piece is at best equal to and perhaps weaker than the queen, especially in the endgame. The empress was first used in Turkish Great Chess, a large medieval variant of chess, where it was called the "war machine" (dabbabah; not to be confused with the piece more commonly referred to as the dabbaba today, which is the (2,0) leaper). It was introduced in the West with Carrera's chess from 1617, where it was called a "champion",