Chess: Difference between revisions

There is a [[Serious Business|great deal of scholarship on how to play chess]], including ideas on the best way to respond to to a kingside pawn, a rook, the Nimzo-Indian Defense, or [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|an opponent who's just had a cheeseburger]]. Without boring you, there are several basic ways to figure out who's winning at any given moment. The player with the '''material advantage''' has, simply, more or better pieces ("material") to his name. The player with the '''positional advantage''' has [[Geo Effects|more control of the board]]. The player with better '''development''' has more pieces in position to strike or defend, an important consideration when your stronger pieces start way back at home row and (even worse) have their movement options limited by your own pawns. And the player with "'''initiative'''" is the one calling the shots, while the other one's just trying to keep up, as one is wont to do when just been engulfed by a [[Xanatos Gambit]]. ([[Paranoia Fuel|Or when you're about to unleash your own...]])

 

 

Chess gives us the [[You Keep Using That Word|oft-misunderstood]] word "gambit". In chess parlance, a "gambit" is an opening strategy in which material is offered in exchange for positional advantage. While all strategy is about taking risks, a ''gambit'' has nothing to do etymologically with something being a ''gamble''. It's actually derived from an Italian wrestling term, ''dare il gambetto'', which describes a type of leg tripping motion. A gambit is a strategy which exchanges a disadvantage of one type in exchange for an advantage of a different type -- and ''not'' a bet, wager, or crazy stunt with a [[Million-to-One Chance]] of success. In games that start out as a [[Mirror Match]], a gambit instantly makes the situation highly asymetrical, but it remains unclear which player's advantage will ultimately prove stronger. If a plan gains a clear overall advantage for one player over the other, that's not a gambit, it's just a mistake on the part of the losing player and/or superior play from the winner.

** Correspondence chess, in where the players may take several days, or weeks, to select a single chess move, is all about checking different "timelines", about the alternate possibilities that would appear from the current position, both from oneself and the opponent. And "transpositions", when the same position is reached by a different move order, is like jumping from one [[Alternate Universe]] to another.

* [[Amazon Brigade]]: If you stop to think about how pawns can promote into not just queens, but also any of the ''other'' pieces besides the king--knights, bishops, ''and'' rooks--you start wondering if maybe the king is the only actual male on your force, if promoted pieces are indistinguishable from initial pieces.

* [[Attack Pattern Alpha]]: Openings. "Start with a conventional Ruy Lopez, and if Black moves into the Cordel Defence, take the game into the Benelux Variant. If they opt for an Open Defence, try to press them into using the Riga Variation rather than the main line, though the Dilworth Attack also leads to an interesting endgame..."

** '''''[http://www.amazon.com/Standard-Chess-Openings-Eric-Schiller/dp/1580420486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256714379&sr=8-1 Times] [http://www.amazon.com/Gambit-Chess-Openings-Eric-Schiller/dp/1580420575/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_c five] [http://www.amazon.com/Unorthodox-Openings-Publishings-Essential-Repertoire/dp/1580420729/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b thousand]...'''''

* [[Badass Normal]]: There are some powerful Pawn attacks available, position permitting.

* [[Batman Gambit]]: Most actual chess gambits (in which material is given up for a strong attack) are examples of this. A computer might be able to find the winning line for the defender easily, but good luck trying to fight through the pressure over the board...

* [[Battle Couple]]: The King and the Queen.

* [[Bilingual Bonus]]: The words "check" and "checkmate" come from the Persian ''Shāh'' and ''Shāh Māt'', meaning "The King" and "The King is Helpless" respectively.

** "Zwischenzug", from the German "intermediate move". An unexpected move inserted into an otherwise predictable sequence, confusing the player on the receiving end and resulting in a situation worse than he expected after the sequence.

* [[Bolivian Army Ending]]: Unless it's a draw, the game ends this way. The king has no way to escape, but you'll never see him getting captured.

* [[Critical Existence Failure]]: Checkmate in less than ten moves tends to feel like this. (Keep in mind that there are only a few ways to lose in that short a time, and most of them require you to either be [[Genre Blind]], be carrying the [[Idiot Ball]], [[Too Dumb to Live]], or flat-out playing to lose.)

** Or a very new player against a more experienced one. Even capable rookies can fall for a four or five move mate if they haven't seen it before.

*** Quicker (and more humiliating still) is the Fool's mate, ending the game in two moves.<ref> 1. g4 e5 2. f4 Qh4++ </ref> Falling victim to this one is a mistake few players ever make, and only once in a lifetime.

* [[Curb Stomp Battle]]: Matches can be horribly one-sided with one player casually slaughtering the other's pieces before finding (or if they're cruel or lack the killer instinct, exploiting) an opening for a checkmate. Especially common between lower-level players with enough skill to exploit an obvious blunder but not always to avoid making one.

* [[Diagonal Speed Boost]]: Averted for the bishop since it can't turn while moving so it takes two turns to get to a position that the <s>castle</s> rook could reach in one. Played straight for the king.

** Played straight for the bishop since it can reach a position in one move that would take the rook two. Also, for the rook to hit its top speed a file has to be cleared of friendly pawns; it is much easier for a diagonal to be cleared for the bishop.

* [[Discard and Draw]]: The Bishop's range was greatly increased, but it lost the ability to jump over pieces.<ref>small loss this, since its previous two-square-''exactly'' move restricted it to ''eight'' squares on the whole board. The four "Bishops" between them could only hit half the board, and could not interact.</ref>

* [[The Dragon]]/[[The Lancer]]: The Queen, depending on which side she's on.

* [[Everything Trying to Kill You]]: Mobile turrets?!

** Siege towers are mobile, of course. Which doesn't stop some people depicting them as stone towers.

** ''"Fairy" Chess'' -- Chess with a bigger board and additional pieces, such as an Archbishop ([[Fusion Dance|a Knight/Bishop combo]]), and a Chancellor ([[Fusion Dance|a Knight/Rook combo]])

** <s>Fischer Random Chess</s> Chess-960 -- where the starting positions are randomized through some kind of means (dice rolls, computer, etc.), but maintain some basic elements; e.g. Bishops must be on opposite colors, the King must be between both rooks)

** Kung-Fu Chess -- You can move any time you want to as long as your hands are fast enough.

** [http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9054 Shahmot] -- Multiplayer chess on a diamond board (free-for-all or team variants available)

** Three-Dimensional Chess: started out as a "futury" background prop on ''[[Star Trek (Franchise)|Star Trek]]'', later had rules codified for it and became fairly popular in [[Real Life]]. Consists of three main boards on different levels with two small 2x2 "attack boards" which may be shifted with a piece on them to another position in lieu of a normal move.

* [[God Save Us From the Queen]]

* [[Guide Dang It]]: While most people can tell you the general rules and basic advanced moves of chess like castling, there are some moves that very few nonprofessional players know about or bother to remember, chief among them the En Passant maneuver, where a player with a pawn in position to capture an enemy pawn if it moves forward one space, and the opponent moves it two spaces forward to evade the capture, the offensive player may move his pawn as if the defending player only moved forward one space. It's a move guaranteed to have a casual player cry foul and be appropriately embarrassed when they find out that it's perfectly legal.

* [[Heart Is an Awesome Power]]/[[Lethal Joke Character]]: As mentioned above, pawns are some of the most important pieces in the game. This is because of two factors; [[Magikarp Power|Their ability to become any piece other than a king if they cross the length of the board]], and [[One-Hit-Point Wonder|the aforementioned fact that every piece is captured in one shot]]. Because of the number and general lack of value of pawns, people are therefore quite obviously loathe to place their significantly more versatile pieces where pawns can threaten them. Thusly, the position and placement of pawns, known as pawn structure, dictates where and how the game is played. The "father of modern (actually strategic; modern means something different now) chess", Francois Philidor, famously said that "Pawns are the soul of the game. They alone create attack and defense, the way they are deployed decides the fate of the game." [[Chess Motifs|Seriously, villains. Don't go up against Philidor.]]

* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: Most gambits involve this. Also, during the midgame, players will sometimes make spectacular piece sacrifices to get at the king.

* [[House Rules]]: Many, many variants exist, the most famous of which is probably "Ultima".

** A recent and extreme example was top player Vladimir Kramnik's blunder against the computer program Deep Fritz in the Man vs. Machine event. After some excellent play on both parts, the game looks set to be drawn. Fritz makes a blatant but easily defeated mate threat, knowing that however Kramnik responds it can force a draw. [http://www.chessbase.com/news/2006/games/vkdf_02.htm Cue Kramnik not doing anything about it at all] and getting checkmated immediately.

** There are also those who resigned when they were ''winning''. Someone collected over 30 such examples [http://www.xs4all.nl/~timkr/chess2/resigntxt.htm here], aptly calling them 'the ultimate blunder'. Even worse is resigning if you had a '''''mate in one'''''. [http://streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.com/2008/03/ultimate-ultimate-blunder.html It actually happened before.] Just as aptly called 'the ultimate ''ultimate'' blunder'.

* [[I Have Many Names]]: The pieces go by various names in different languages, and even within the same language (eg. "horse" and "knight", "castle" and "rook").

* [[In Spite of a Nail]]: It is very possible for someone to dominate the vast majority of a game only to lose/draw to a superior end game player.

* [[No Pronunciation Guide]]: Kind of a given, since positions and variations are named after players from all over the world. Probably the most commonly misread names are the Pirc Defence ("peerts") and the Lucena position ("loo-thay-na").

* [[Non-Action Guy]]: The King. Though he [[Took a Level In Badass|gets better]] in the endgame, he's still slow.

** You used to be allowed to promote a pawn to one of the other player's pieces or leave it as a Pawn. You could also move into triple check (only check and double check counted as check) and checkmate with an illegal move.

** [[Guide Dang It|En passant]] is itself an [[Obvious Rule Patch]] to the two-square initial pawn move.

* [[Oh Crap]]: [[Didn't See That Coming]]

* [[One-Hit-Point Wonder]]: Any piece can capture (or, in the case of the King, check or mate) any other piece with a single attack.

* [[Overly Long Gag]]: Averted. The entire point of the threefold repetition rule is to prevent this.

** Also known as Correspondence Chess. It may take months to finish a game like this. The Internet can speed this up significantly, though.

* [[Player Tic]]: Most players will announce resigning a game by knocking their own king down. This is unnecessary, as simply ''announcing'' your decision is sufficient but has become part of the collective mannerism of the chess world.

* [[Promotion to Opening Titles]]: Pawns get one if they manage to cross the board unscathed.

* [[Quirky Miniboss Squad]]: Ever tried to give mate with just king, knight, and bishop versus king?

** Their asymmetrical natures are the main staple of the material point scoring system in chess. Rooks are each worth five points and bishops and knights three each, because while a king and one rook alone can checkmate an enemy king, a king and one bishop or knight alone cannot. (In balance, Rooks are amongst the hardest pieces to get into play: the [[Mighty Glacier]] of chess.)

** Actually, he ''is'' a [[Non-Action Guy]]. True, he can hold his own one-on-one, but when an enemy at his doorstep is protected by another enemy, there's nothing he can do but run away or hope someone else can capture.

* [[Sadistic Choice]]: Forks force a player to choose which piece is captured.

* [[Serious Business]]: When entire lives have been dedicated to mastering the game as much as is humanly possible, you better believe chess is ''very'' serious business.

 

* [[Stone Wall]]: The playing style of Tigran Petrosian could be described as this. He put safety above all else, and put more effort in hindering his opponent's attacking plans than executing his own. While this approach gave him quite a few draws that could have been victories, it gave him lots and lots draws that could have been losses. Because of this defensive style, he's generally regarded as the hardest player to beat in his prime. Earned him the nickname "[[Made of Iron|Iron]]" Tigran. <ref>[[Meaningful Name|Amusingly, his surname derives from Petros, meaning "rock".]]</ref>

** "They say my games should be more 'interesting'. I could be more 'interesting' — and also lose."

* [[Stop Copying Me]]: A frequent tactic by people who don't know what they're doing. It generally ends in disaster.

** The Russian opening is all about this. If the black side merely copies white without ever deviating, white will deliver a devastating check that black will not be able to mimic.

** That said, copying can safely go on for several moves in ''some'' openings. For example, the aptly named Symmetrical Variation of the Symmetrical English opening, 1. c4 c5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. g3 g6 5. Bg2 Bg7 6. O-O O-O, is a perfectly respectable opening for both players.

* [[Surrounded By Idiots]]: In many checkmates, some of the king's escape routes are blocked by allies. There's even a type of mate called smothered mate, where a lone knight gives checkmate to a king who is completely surrounded by pieces that are supposed to be helping him.

* [[Sweet Polly Oliver]]/[[Tomato Surprise]]: Pawns that Queen.

** Joshua Waitzkin, the subject of ''[[Searching for Bobby Fischer]]'' and face of the game series ''[[Game/Chessmaster|Chessmaster]]'', was one of these.

*** Bobby Fischer himself was one, winning the United States Chess Championship at the age of 14.

* [[Timed Mission]]: Most organized competitions give each player only a certain amount of time to make all of their moves. If a player's time runs out, that player automatically loses.

* [[Too Awesome to Use]]: The Queen, especially in the opening. Some openings take advantage of the mentality, such as the Parham Attack (which can develop into the Scholar's Mate, which is based around having the Queen sit next to the King, while the Bishop covers the Queen and prevents the King from taking her).