When I wrote my first blog post about blue Swiss parrot Globi, I had no idea I had stumbled upon a whole stash of material. So far, I’m aware of at least four Globi issues with a chess scene, without even doing a methodical search. Perhaps the author misunderstood and thought the Swiss were supposed to be really into chess instead of cheese. 1 Whatever the case, Globi is back at the chessboard. Last time, he was playing an alien slug. This time it’s even worse: he’s playing a bearded man.
Yes, it is true: his opponent — a professor Härtig2 — has a rather impressive beard. So impressive that it hides part of the chessboard. I’m pretty sure this qualifies as disturbing or annoying your opponent, which is expressly forbidden by the FIDE laws of chess. But there is probably no arbiter around as they’re not even playing with a clock, so Globi fetches some scissors to deal with the problem in a more radical fashion. As so often, the threat proves stronger than the execution: to save his magnificent beard, professor Härtig agrees to tie it in a bow on top of his head.
But all of that is just a distraction from what is really going on. At the end of the story, with the beard cleared out of the way, the position seems to be the following:3
There’s a lot to say about this position. It seems to be the result of randomly strewing pieces on a chessboard, but this far in the endgame that’s a bit less egregious. I’m not even going to complain about it, because I have much more important stuff to complain about. The fact that, in the first picture, they’re playing on a seven-by-eight board for example. Or the fact that the black rook is teleporting around between a7 and a8. Or the black pawn that makes a cameo appearance on a7 in the top right image.
When I saw the alien slug in the fifty-seventh issue, I thought it was an aberration, far weirder than Globi’s day-to-day adventures. But no: the wrongly sized boards and the alien, flickering pawns had been there a long time already. Sad, very sad.
Realism: 0/5 I’d be hard-pressed to assign a concrete grade to the actual position. Fortunately, the impossible board at the start makes the assignment unnecessary.
Probable winner: It’s never made entirely clear whose move it is. If it’s white, he will simply take the h4 knight and win by virtue of a massive amount of extra pawns. If it’s black, he probably has to play Nxf5 after which Rd1, with the threat of Nf6, still seems to favour white.
1. [Perhaps he was confused by the extra e in Caxton’s work.] ↩
2. [He’ll turn me in an antifessor in no time.] ↩
3. [König der Diagrammmacher.] ↩