On August 30, 1624, playwright Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was arrested in London after producing a play, A Game of Chess, that satirized the proposed marriage of Prince Charles with a Spanish princess. The play was performed in the Globe Theater in London. Its nine performances, from August 5-14, 1624, was the greatest box-office hit and the most talked about dramatic work of early modern London. After Middleton’s arrest, the play was censored and was not allowed to be shown again.
In 1793, Thomas Paine (1737-1809), author of The Rights of Man and Common Sense, was supposedly arrested in Paris for favoring the exile of King Louis XVI rather than his execution. Paine was scheduled to be guillotined, but his fiancée/wife intervened in a strange way. She frequented the Café de la Regence, disguised as a man, where Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-1794) frequented, and she defeated him in a game of chess. Robespierre challenged her again and promised to grant any wish if she won again. She again won and asked that her husband’s life be spared. Thomas Paine then was released from prison. (source: Ripley’s Believe It or Not, 1944). Another source says the lady was Jacqueline Armand, the fiancée of a duke who was about to be guillotined. A third source says that the lady was the wife of the Marquis de Merin, who was recently condemned to death by guillotine
In April 1862, chess player Armand Edward Blackmar (1826-1888), of the Blackmar Gambit and Blackmar-Diemer fame, was arrested, fined, and jailed by Union General Ben Butler (1818-1893) and imprisoned by Union soldiers in New Orleans for publishing “seditious” (Confederate) music, such as the Bonnie Blue Flag (Band of Brothers) and the Dixie War Song.
Riv, I consider it a mission of sorts to have anyone that knows the board setup, move, and all rules of chess able to follow, if they want, any illustrated and notated game that I post here. Your statement about not being able to understand what is going on in that Steinitz/Rock game is a reproach on me.
The guidelines you posted should be sufficient to have just about anyone able to play their first game on a board at home, hopefully. (If it's not, I plan to revisit the compilation a few times; on each re-posting it'll soon become so.)
Need to take it to the next level. Need to teach people Day 2, 3, and 4 skills, so they can at least look at and appreciate what's remarkable about the action in a well-crafted video.
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More on that later, though. Right now I've been holding on to the illustrations for this game too long:
1. e4 {[%emt 0:0:3]} e6 {[%emt 0:0:3]} 2. Nf3 {[%emt 0:0:10]} d5 {[%emt 0:0:11]} 3. Bb5+ {[%emt 0:0:9]} Bd7 {[%emt 0:0:13]} 4. Bd3 {[%emt 0:0:3]} Nf6 {[%emt 0:0:36]} 5. 0-0 {[%emt 0:0:19]} dxe4 {[%emt 0:0:4]} 6. Re1 {[%emt 0:0:49]} exd3 {[%emt 0:0:9]} 7. cxd3 {[%emt 0:0:3]} Bd6 {[%emt 0:0:30]} 8. d4 {[%emt 0:0:4]} 0-0 {[%emt 0:0:7]} 9. d3 {[%emt 0:0:18]} Nc6 {[%emt 0:0:35]} 10. Nc3 {[%emt 0:1:10]} Re8 {[%emt 0:0:6]} 11. Bg5 {[%emt 0:0:14]} h6 {[%emt 0:0:10]} 12. Bh4 {[%emt 0:0:6]} g5 {[%emt 0:0:10]} 13. Nxg5 {[%emt 0:0:24]} hxg5 {[%emt 0:0:10]} 14. Bxg5 {[%emt 0:0:2]} Qe7 {[%emt 0:0:29]} 15. Ne4 {[%emt 0:0:8]} Qf8 {[%emt 0:0:31]} 16. Nxf6+ {[%emt 0:0:15]} Kh8 {[%emt 0:0:13]} 17. Qh5+ {[%emt 0:0:3]} Kg7 {[%emt 0:0:12]} 18. Qh7# {[%emt 0:0:3]Mate} 1-0
I'll get this rolling with explaining one of the first significant plays of the above game, a blunder on my part, and a fairly big one at that.
(This is a somewhat complex game compared to the rapid win games I posted many pages ago; I'll likely revisit it a few times and expand, or replace it altogether for better examples in the near future.)
First thing that comes to mind is the stream of conscious thought:
"This is like Organic Chemistry. From the learner's perspective you're discarding nearly everything taught and which you took such pains to learn and trying to focus on something unfathomable and mysterious."
"Also, intermediate steps are discarded. I don't know why we started at point D and how we arrived at point M and I can't now predict point P."
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An excellent book entitled "Why Students Don't Like School" by Daniel T. Willingham explains that the actual perception and thinking of the skilled player is different from that of the novice. For me, for instance, I knew the moment I castled that I screwed up.
It takes discipline to re-think and figure how to relate what I'm seeing in novice terms. But I want to try, so:
(Novice Thought)
-- The knight moves in an L shape. It does in the first scan.
It can do so again. It would land on that white pawn if it did.
(Somewhat experienced player thought)
-- Much more significantly, if instead that white pawn is captured by the black pawn, not only is that black pawn protected from retaliation, that same pawn now has a choice of taking a piece worth at least 3 times its value.
To appreciate the following you need to understand that Black's King is at g8,
Black's Queen is at D8, and, if the black knight at F6 moves without making sure she's protected, that Queen at D8, the most powerful piece on the board, and second most valuable for black, gets taken out by the bishop at G5.
This is a pin. The black knight guarding the black queen from the white bishop is "stuck" there, like a butterfly pinned to a cushion.
Actually, a LITTLE less than that. This pin is not absolute, as a pin forcing a guard to protect a king in chess would be.
That knight CAN move if he really wants to. Black would be almost certain to lose the game if he moved that knight. But he COULD move that knight if he REALLY wanted ...
So the action in these scans centers on this pin and practically nothing else.
Black REALLY wants to break it. While it is in effect, the Black Knight guarding the Black Queen is useless, and even the Black Queen herself, most powerful piece on the board, is hampered. All because of that lone white bishop at G5.
It is too much to tolerate. Black doesn't feel he can make effective progress with it in place. So he sends a pawn from his castle. The white bishop retreats along the diagonal. But because he has effective control OF the diagonal the queen-guarding black knight is on, being a bishop that moves diagonally and all, the white bishop is STILL pinning that black knight to that spot on the board in the black queen's defense.
So Black sends the pawn that made up his king's castle's central "wall"
to force that bishop away.
I capture that pawn with my knight.
Even though I'm already points down, even though that knight is worth 3 times the value of the pawn it is sacrificing itself for, even though the knight is my favorite piece, I take that pawn, knowing it will be taken in turn.
It's taken.
I take out that knight-killing pawn in return.
And my white bishop's pin on the black knight guarding the black queen is re-established:
But the black queen, despite my bishop's seeming focus on her, was never my true target. After my early blunder, and especially after sacrificing a SECOND piece to a pawn to maintain that pin, I need to end this quickly, not test the strength of Black's secondary pieces.
Thanks to my opponent essentially destroying his castle to repel my bishop earlier, though, I have mate forced in 3 moves:
Fasting Benefits Tree, Jason Fung, etcetera
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LWk1FkJV1ok
(First mate via underpromotion of THIS type that I've ever seen.)
