Sacrifice in games

Sacrifice is also used metaphorically to describe a number of plays in games. Sacrifices, in this sense, are plays that lose pieces or opportunities in order to obtain a more important advantage.

In chess, a number of exchanges are described as sacrifices: these typically involve losing a piece or a pawn to disrupt the opponent’s formation and open up an attack. Chess openings that involve sacrifices are usually called “gambits” by chess players; in these gambits, usually a pawn is deliberately lost; gambits that lose a piece are rare and risky.

In contract bridge, a sacrifice is a deliberate higher level bid of a contract which is likely to fail, in the hope that the adverse cost of the failure will still be less than the opponents’ likely successful scores would have been.

In baseball, a sacrifice fly is a play in which a batter hits a fly ball deep into the outfield for an out so as to enable a runner on any base, depending on the runner’s speed, to score. Likewise, a sacrifice bunt in baseball is one in which a batter deliberately allows himself to be put out while advancing a teammate to second and/or third base, from where he has a greater chance to score. Players who commit either a sacrifice fly or bunt are not charged with a “time at bat,” thus the out that they sacrificed is not charged against their batting average.

In a some role-playing games certain characters have the ability to give up their hit points for the benefit of their allies. In the game World of Warcraft a player of the Paladin class may sacrifice the life of their character in order to provide temporary invulnerability to another player.