For more than two decades, from 1967 to 1994 to be precise, Terence Hill and Bud Spencer where a mainstay of the spaghetti western genre. They figured together in no less than sixteen movies. The last of these is our subject today: botte di natale (the fight before Christmas), a play on words with notte di natale (Christmas night), in which a gunslinger is tasked by his mother to bring his bounty hunter brother home for Christmas. We’re not interested in this duo, though, but rather in the sheriff and his deputy, because throughout the movie they play chess with each other a number of times, their games usually ending by something landing on the board and scattering the pieces in all directions.
If you have read some of my other blog posts, you will have noticed that I usually start with a short text providing context for the subject at hand. But sometimes, I simply fail. Sometimes, not even the pen of Dickens, Milton or the Great Bard himself could do justice to the truth. Sometimes, words are not enough. This, I think, is one of those times. I do not know how to prepare you. I do not know how to soften the blow. The only thing I can suggest is that you cast your eye on the image below and marvel. Marvel at the sight of a giant rotino playing chess.
I have a conjecture: every sufficiently well-known fictional detective will sooner or later be confronted with chess. A slightly – but only very slightly – stronger variation of this conjecture would be: every sufficiently well-known fictional detective will sooner or later end up on this site. As evidence for this conjecture, their are e.g. the cases of Poirot, Columbo, Holmes and, since today, Maigret. As you probably know, Maigret is a French detective in the police force, created by Belgian Georges Simenon, which makes this extra appropriate for this site. In this post, we’ll talk about the long running tv show Maigret with Bruno Cremer as the eponymous hero.1
It is time to bring some culture to this blog again – and nothing screams culture like some classical painting. Besides, the last time I did this, it went quite well. So I’m going to do it again! This time, the focus is on Herbert Ashwin Budd, a 20th century English painter who is mainly known for not being that well-known. One of his paintings – the only one I’m interested in – is titled The chess board and, unsurprisingly, features a chess board. Or at least most of a chess board.1
I found a new bizarre niche of CIPC material to get lost in! You can go online, find some pictures of cheap chess sets and revel in the weirdness of the cardboard boxes they come in. As for the chess program covers I talked about before, one would expect that these are products aimed at chess players and that the designers therefore would have made some effort to make them not look ridiculous and, here as there, one would be sorely disappointed. So I scalped some pictures from amazon and will parade them on your screen for your amusement.
Long, long time ago, when I started this blog, I already knew that, inevitably, I would end up talking about Sherlock Holmes. I don’t think there is any mention of him playing chess in the original stories,1 but he’s a detective. If the viewers have to believe that he’s a detective, you have to show that he’s smart – and if you want to show someone is smart, you show him playing chess. Today the day has finally come to face my unavoidable destiny and tackle the world’s most famous detective. We meet him in the 1959 version of The hound of the Baskervilles, being played by Peter Cushing and in turn playing the white pieces against no-one in particular.
Tarantino syndrome is a disease which has been affecting many young movies, often with a great pedigree, for decades now. A textbook case is offered by the hateful eight.1 At first, all is going well: the acting is great, the music is masterful,2 the cinematography is gorgeous – everything looks very promising. Then, all of a sudden, madness strikes. The whole thing derails spectacularly, gore and blood starts flying everywhere, and any semblance of immersion goes out of the window. Of course, in this case there are some complications, in that the fervent, chipper CIPCers were already out of the movie when the following appeared on screen:
In every big city you can find a games bar nowadays; a place where you can get together to play boardgames with friends1 while having a drink and possibly some typical bar food. In these kind of places, you have a higher than usual chance of finding chess inspired decorations. Take for example Barneby, a games bar situated in the hip Neustadt district in the North of Dresden. On the northern wall, right opposite a shelf filled with board games, you can find a tapestry that puts the Bayeux one2 to shame: this one features chess.
Parody is a tricky genre. When it fails, it tends to fall completely flat, but when it succeeds, ah, then you might just get a masterpiece. Like Mozart’s Musikalischer Spaß, Godfried Bomans’ De avonturen van Bill Clifford, or “Weird Al” Yankovic’s White & Nerdy. Yankovic has been parodying pop songs since the eighties, replacing the original lyrics with a bit of comedy. His most popular effort is probably White & Nerdy, a parody of the 2006 rap song Drivin’ by one hit wonder Chamillionaire. Both the original and the parody are heart-wrenching tales about racial profiling: the original about a black guy being constantly pulled over by the police, the parody about someone who wants to bowl with the gangstas but is rejected because he’s too white and nerdy. As proof of his nerd cred, the protagonist states that he was “in AV club, in glee club, and even a chess team” while showing pictures from an old book as evidence.
By now, there are several thousands of games on this site. How is one supposed to find games that are interesting? The answer is that one is not. One can, from now, look at the Best Of Belgian Chess History posts to find some of the more interesting ones. One can even make suggestions to the webmaster. One is very lucky, indeed.
The scene:
The mid-fifties. An enormous correspondence tournament is organised in honour of the great correspondence player Eduard Dyckhoff. And by enormous, I mean gigantic: more than a thousand people played. The main invitation group consisted of some very high-level players, including renowned correspondence players like Heemsoth, Napolitano, and Barda as well as top over-the-board players like Schmid and the Belgian champion O’Kelly de Galway. The over-the-board players dominated.
The protagonists:
White: Julius Nielsen, 52 years
In 1954, Bent Larsen had not burst on to the tournament scene yet and Denmark was not really a chess-playing nation. Nielsen had been among the top of this small circle for quite a while, being selected twice for the national olimpiad team, but his main claim to fame is probably that he edited Skakbladet, the official magazine of the Danish chess union. Later on he would reach the final of the correspondence world championship.
Black: IM Albéric O’Kelly de Galway, 43 years
After World War II, O’Kelly’s star had shot up rapidly: he had won the Hoogovens tournament, the zonal tournament, the São Paulo international tournament and a numbers of smaller tournament. When this tournament started, he had established himself among the world’s top 50 players, ranking as high as the 27th place in 1954 according to chessmetrics. He had not been doing a lot of correspondence chess, probably due to an overfull schedule, so it was not clear how well he would do against experienced correspondence player.
Why did I choose this game?
Mainly on advice of O’Kelly himself. In his book 34 mal Schachlogik, he calls it probably the most complicated game he had played. It is a fascinating struggle in the Najdorf Sicilian. O’Kelly would later go on to write one of the first books about this opening, in which he also explained this game.
With this blog, I will critique chess as it appears in all sorts of popular media. I will honour the good and, probably much more frequently, castigate the bad.
