Mar
2

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.
| ![]() | |
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
Another interesting trap is the Lasker Trap, but for now we continue with explaining some of the more difficult Chess Notation Symbols.



















March 7th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
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.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
thanks for relating painting to chess.
eddie