Oh yes, it’s that time again: we’re talking about a long-running television series featuring an extremely smart but ill-socialised middle-aged man in the main role. In this case, Mr .Monk is an obsessive compulsive private detective. In the episode we’ll be looking at, he is called upon by a woman who hires her to solve her own upcoming murder. In order to do so, Monk has to square off against the scheming grandmaster Patrick Kloster. 1
In the beginning of the episode, things don’t go his way because otherwise it would have been the end of the episode already. So he tries to get the help of one of Kloster’s main rivals: a young Niemann look-alike who has managed a draw against Kloster and who is currently hustling his chess skills in the local park.
Monk is just in time to see him dispatch an opponent. The boy wonder has black in the following position:2
The board they’re using is built into the table, so they couldn’t make h1 black. But they took revenge for the perversions they have been denied and put up the most ridiculous position they could possibly think of. And I’m not even talking about the harrowing imprisonment of that poor bishop Why are both kings in check?
Clearly, the players are not very familiar with such small details as the basic rules of the game they’re playing. Nor, in fact, does the continuity man know hi job particularly well. We cut to a different shot, in which we see our young prodigy take a rook on h5 with his queen from d1. There is no rook on h4. His opponent leaves. In defeat, we’re supposed to assume, but it’s really in disgust. One of Mr. Monk’s companions take his place. The young champion opens 1. c4 and the reply is 1. … f5
Pseudo-Niemann: The Bird opening! I’ve only seen that five times today.
That’s a strange Bird you have there! Also, how many games have you been playing to encounter five 1. …f5s to your 1.c4?3 In any case, I bet he didn’t expect to see 2. … g5 after his 2. b3. He plays 3. e4 a tempo and his opponent, sadly deprived of a functioning mind, takes the pawn. She gets immediately mated with Qh5, which allows to bring this sordid affair to a close.
Can we send Mr. Monk after the director next?
Realism: 0/5 Obviously this is impossible. And if even someone who doesn’t know the rules can draw with this genius, I start to have serious doubts about that epithet.
Probable winner: Black, apparently, but white might have demanded to go back to the last legal position.
1. [In this episode, Monk is trying to get in the head of Kloster. Surely this is not a coincidence?] ↩
2. [The Genius is, of course, the maker of this diagram editor.] ↩
3. [Lichess has 187790 games that start with 1.c4 at the moment, of which 4571 continued with 1. … f5, or about two and a half percent. This suggests that pseudo-Niemann must have played some two hundred games in the day.] ↩