The chess history website on which this blog is a weird, possibly malignant, tumour includes only tournaments from the year 2000 or earlier. The reasoning behind that cut-off is that, from around 2000 on, information becomes much easier to find because it was published online. That’s not always a given though. Somewhere in the early naughts, Skechers, which is a very big brand of shoes, had an advertisement campaign featuring Robert Downey junior, who is a very big brand of actor.1 Yet the one version of the ad that includes a chessboard is very hard to find. Not impossible, though.
Admittedly, the version I’ve found suffers from terrible brightness, but at least it’s usable. We can see Mr. Downey redefining style as sitting with your shoes on the sofa.2 On his right, a chessboard populated with rather unusual chessmen is sitting on a coffee table that’s pushed way too close to the sofa.
On the chessboard, the following position can be seen, although black’s queen’s side is sadly out of frame:3
The black king could easily be an impostor since we only see a small portion of his feet presumed royal. But I suspect he’s the real deal. After all, the position looks weird but not too outlandish for a game between beginners. Presumably, there’s knight on d7 keeping the bishop on c8 away from white’s queen.
That still leaves the question of who’s defending the d5, of course. Some mysteries will probably remain unsolved forever, but perhaps it is Iron Man.4
Realism: 3/5 I cannot be too harsh in both possible senses of that phrase. On the one hand, h1 is a black square and one can argue easily that that should mean an immediate zero. On the other hand, if we ignore that, we get a relatively normal position — assuming, of course, there’s nothing untoward going on on black’s queen’s side.
Probable winner: Impossible to say. Possibly the cleaning firm they’ll have to call to clean the sofa that someone has been sitting on with his shoes.
1. [And who also bears the perfect name for a baby duck.] ↩
2. [Although, actually, it’s the organ connecting the ovary to the stamen in angiosperm plants.] ↩
3. [Skechers got Robert Downey Junior to advertise for them, this diagram editor got me.] ↩
4. [To chemists, Iron Man is known as FeMale.] ↩