Desperado
A piece that is certain to be captured and therefore captures something of its own before being taken, extracting maximum value from an otherwise doomed piece.
A desperado tactic squeezes extra material or a favorable trade out of a piece that has no way to escape capture, since it has nothing left to lose by taking something on its way out.
Etymology
Etymonline dates desperado to about 1600 in the sense of a person in despair, and to the 1640s in the sense of a desperate or reckless man. It describes the word as a mock-Spanish alteration of the English noun desperate, itself recorded from the 1560s meaning a reckless criminal, from Latin desperatus, the past participle of desperare. Etymonline adds the caution that the Old Spanish adjective desperado, out of hope, was apparently never used as a noun and is probably unrelated, so the Spanish look of the word is a stylistic borrowing rather than a true descent. In chess the reckless-outlaw sense is applied to a doomed piece: Wikipedia records two meanings, a piece that is en prise or trapped and captures something before being taken, and a piece sacrificed to force stalemate, also called a mad or crazy rook. Winter's list of earliest occurrences of chess terms points to Chess Note 5924 and an Emanuel Lasker citation of 1926 for the chess sense, though that note itself was not retrieved here.
First documented: n.a. for the chess sense — Edward Winter's earliest-occurrences list points to Chess Note 5924 (Emanuel Lasker, 1926) for the chess usage; the underlying English word is dated c. 1600 by Etymonline
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.