When I played online poker, one of the terms I coined was "the Lazarus line"; I defined it as the number of chips below which you could not allow your stack to fall if you wanted to avoid losing your whole starting stake. If your stack ever fell below that line but you somehow managed to recover and make a profit, that meant you'd made an escape worthy of Lazarus :-)
I'll now coin a similar term for online chess. A "Lazarus game" is one in which at one point your opponent has mate on the move, doesn't see it, the game continues, and you end up winning. Between experienced players, Lazarus games almost never happen at classical time controls; however, I have a hunch they happen fairly frequently in blitz. I had one last night.
At some point, I'll write a program to identify all the Lazarus games I've won (and lost). I'll provide it to monvieux, so he can run it on his games. He just informed me that he lost what I'll call a modified Lazarus game last night. It wasn't strictly a Lazarus game since he didn't have mate on the move, but he did miss a forced mate in three.
neostreet: 1199 (104-105-13 (222))
monvieux: 1269 (306-253-15 (574))
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