With a title like Pat a Mat, of course there must be a chess scene in this series! Yet that’s apparently a bit of a coincidence, as the name of the series comes form the names of the two protagonists, who are in turn named after the Czech words for clumsy and awkward, But, coincidence or not, a chess scene there is. Is turns up in the eighth episode when Pat and Mat want to play a game of chess. Sadly, all their pieces are white — and they can’t make peace with that.
And so they decide to boil half of the pieces in a large kettle with some sort of swarthy broth and soon enough they are black. However, Pat has put all sixteen pawns in the pot and none of the other pieces. And so they start in what must be the most alien position ever showcased on this blog:1
Pat, who has white, opens with 1.Nf4. I think Mat answers with c6, but it’s not very clear. Not to the viewer, but also not to the players. The light bulb breaks2 and they move the table, with the chessboard on it, to replace it. During that move, the pawn falls over and they immediately start arguing whether it should be on f5 or c3, before finally settling on d5.
After that, our two anti-heroes leave the chessboard and concentrate on the light.3 That’s perhaps a bit disappointing, but it’s much more surprising. Seeing how they abuse our game, they’re clearly more into the dark side.
Realism: 0/5 Even a zero is generous. This position shouldn’t even get a number. Or a letter. At best, it should get one of those obscure glyphs that a hermit used once in 1974 and.have been in the ASCII code set ever since.
Probable winner: Nobody. Not black because he is down enough material to build an extra country with in the Pacific Ocean. Not white because because there’s no enemy king to checkmate.
1. [So alien, I expect this diagram to burst out of Kane’s chest.] ↩
2. [Probably because it had to watch them play.] ↩
3. [Světlo means ‘light’ in Czech, so that’s not too surprising..] ↩