Xanderman has started a thread about a “private” chess game, wherein one person plays both sides. It reminds me -
Oddly, this actually happened at the World Championship in 1858, the year the finals were in Plitzschift. It was in the first round, in Mwrag, and Bungermeier was to play the Pole, Whimpsky, but Bungermeier had to forfeit at the last minute, due to some legal difficulties caused by his consort, the infamous Mlle Sansbrassiere, who evidently had an opium problem before it was fashionable in polite society to do so.
Due to some technical difficulties with the soon-to-be heavily-revised Schlump Method used in seeding the tournanment, Whimpsky, who by rule had to play the next seed (to Bungermeier), wound up doing just that. The problem was that he was the next seed. As I said, the Schlump Method was soon revised. Well, it was jettisoned.
Anyway, Whimpsky played the black pieces well, after an itnitial problem with his Kerosenian Defense, where he lost a knight, three pawns and queenside-castled to a position that put him in a mate-in-three which he, astonishingly, (look at the game summary, some time) overlooked at the white pieces even though he surely gave himself away on the black pieces with the utterance of an oath that I will not repeat here (or so legend has it, at any rate). He eventually recovered and forced a stalemate with himself. Under the old scoring sytem, this actually wound up giving him the half-point that was ultimately his margin of victory in the tournament. If he had won, he would have lost, which would have kept him from the finals. All in all, a fascinating chapter in the history of chess, a thrilling retelling of which can be found in Ernst Werklempter’s popular volume “Eight by Eight is Enough, Already”.
never underestimate the proletariate in large numbers.
and if then can advance and push enoguh to that breaking point of revolution and be sacraficed a reincarnated as a societally higher piece.
…and because if you squint you’re eyes rreal tight the top of the pawns look like boobs
My best friend and I tried a number of times to play chess together it always ended in a stalemate, every damn game. She is the only person that I ever played with that had the game end in a stalemate. It was wierd. After about the 20th game we stopped trying. No more chess between us, we switched to backgammon and Gin Rummy.
How often do stalemates actually happen in the chess world?
Not very often, Kris. If you like the unusual in chess, you might enjoy Mishka Krumpel’s “Reverse Chess”, wherin he chronicles many games of the International Reverse Chess Club. They begin at the final position of professional chess games and try to work their way back to the original configuration of the pieces. The player who accomplishes this first wins.
=D>