The Greatest Chess Story Ever Told
A Tale of Ethics, Villainy, and Computer Programming. With puzzles.
Today I am going to share with you the story of the most frustrating and bizarre chess game I have ever played. I’ll start with a puzzle position. But before I share the puzzle, I want to give a strict warning. Please do not spend more than 60 seconds trying to solve this puzzle. The solution is so mind-bending, and requires such outrageous out of the box thinking, that you won’t be able to solve it using normal methods. And if you do spend a lot of time on it, you will be angry with me in a moment when I explain the background and solution. Ok, with that out of the way, here is the puzzle (I repeat, DO NOT spend more than 60 seconds on this puzzle):
Puzzle #1 Black to play
This position looks quite strong for white and should in fact be winning, but it turns out that black has an absolutely stunning resource. The only hint that I will give, which is also key to the solution, is that the game this puzzle is drawn from was played about 20 years ago on the now-defunct Yahoo! Chess platform in the early days on online gaming.
The Game
Ok, let’s back up and set the scene. It is the early 2000s. The chess internet is not nearly as well developed as it is today. There is ICC, but its got a weird interface. There are a few other decent sites. But Yahoo! is a web behemoth with lots of offerings and their chess site is free, user-friendly, and at the time was one of the sites with the most users. As a result it was always easy to find a game, so this is where I usually played.
On this particular day, I began a game that seemed fairly normal in most respects. It was a blitz game, probably 3 minutes or 5 minutes with no increment or delay. At the time my rating was probably around 1600 and I’m sure my opponent’s was about the same. I played reasonably well and had secured a pretty advantageous position. I no longer remember the exact position that I had, but I have created a very similar one that shares all of the most crucial characteristics. I will show that position after a short digression.
Computer Programming for Chess
I’m sure that these days most programmers would find it quite simple to create a basic web-based chess playing tool. You load up the board and piece images that you want, and enter code for all of the rules of chess. As humans, those rules are easy for us to memorize. Bishops move diagonally. You can’t capture your own pieces. Only knights can pass over other pieces on the board. If your king is attacked (thus in check), your next move must be to get out of the check in one way or another. Etc, etc.
These rules are not especially difficult to define and program. However one important aspect is to incorporate what we might think of as “rule prioritization” into the scheme. What has become intutitive to most of us is not immediately obvious to the program. If two chess movement rules are in conflict, which one takes priority? Bishops are allowed to move along diagonals. But you can’t capture your own pieces. The latter is the stronger rule. So if there is a square along a diagonal from your bishop occupied by one of your other pieces, you are not allowed to move there. The program must prioritize “don’t capture your own pieces” over “allow any bishop moves along a diagonal.”
Likewise you cannot legally make a move that puts you in check. If your bishop is interposing between your king and an opponent’s rook along a rank or file you may not move the bishop, as this would expose your king to check. The rule “don’t make a move that would leave you in check” must be prioritized over “allow any bishop moves along a diagonal.” While the list of rules for how to move chess pieces is not overly long, the prioritization order must be carefully delineated.
This digression provides a further clue to Puzzle #1, above, so feel free to scroll back up and take another 30 seconds to try to find the solution.
The Position
Ok, back to the game. To repeat, this is not precisely the position I had, but it was something very much like this:
White to play
Here I had an attractive position with several possible winning moves. The one that I chose was c4, arriving at the position in Puzzle #1 at the beginning of this post. You can see the logic behind this move - I create connected passed pawns that will be very difficult to stop. Black’s rook will likely have to be sacrificed to capture one of them and the other will queen before black’s kingside pawns have enough time for counterplay. This move benefits from the somewhat unusual positioning of white’s rook and black’s king along the fourth rank, which prevents black from capturing en passant as he might otherwise be able to do. For that reason, I thought of it as a somewhat elegant move. If you grasped the point of the section about computer programming, you can probably see where this is all leading.
Solution to Puzzle #1
My opponent responded to my strong c4 move with the immediate reply dxc3?!?* This incredible shot was absolutely the strongest move available and it resulted in this position on the board:
White to play
It would be fair to say that I was flummoxed by this development. The Yahoo! chess site, one of the leading chess websites in the world, had permitted my opponent to make an illegal move exposing his king to check. Now perhaps you are an aggressive piece-grabber and your immediate instinct would have been to grab the king right away. My reaction was different, and more concerned, and proceeded in roughly the following stages.
1) What? What happens now? It allowed an illegal move, what do I do?
2) What’s going to happen if I capture the king? If the site allowed en passant into check, do I have any reason to believe it will consider my capturing black’s king as a victory condition? Or will the game freeze? Or just continue without the king?
3) Maybe my opponent will request to take back his move, having realized by now that he moved into check. That would be the simplest way out of this mess.
4) <Waits> He is not doing that. I am going to have to make a move, my clock is running and I’ve already spent 20 seconds staring at this position.
5) Hey wait, if I DON’T capture his king, for the reason listed in #2, I have no other good moves. Rc4, Ra1, Ra7 all look like they are losing. I am basically FORCED to capture his king, and hope that this results in a win.
#5 was absolutely the correct assessment of the position. On any move other than RxK I am hopelessly lost. I captured the king, believing as I did so that I had earned victory.
A Transit From Better to Worse
Now another digression. I can only assume that over the many years Yahoo! Chess was in operation, this was not the only game to have featured an illegal move. This type of position is unusual, but a rook or queen on the fourth rank with an opponent’s pinned pawn isn’t the only way this could happen. A pawn could also be pinned against a king standing on the 3rd or 5th ranks and thus prohibited to capture en passant by the rules of chess, but allowed to do so by the program. Surely out of millions of games on the platform, there must have been a few others who were affected by the protocol glitch to prioritize “allow en passant” over “don’t allow moves into check”. But what may have been unique about my game was the dramatic change in evaluation resulting from the allowed illegal move. Prior to dxc3, I was significantly better. Stockfish evaluates the position as about +5 or +6 for white, comfortably and easily winning. After dxc3 is allowed and with any subsequent move for white other than RxK, it is black who has a completely winning position, +11 or better.
To demonstrate my unique conundrum, I offer two more puzzles which add one piece to the black or white side to avoid the severe swing in evaluation. Now that you know what’s going on, please solve the following:
Puzzle #2 White to play and win
Puzzle #3 White to play
Solutions to Puzzles #2 and #3
You might find it odd to be asked to solve a puzzle which asks you to make a move while your opponent’s king is en prise. I absolutely sympathize. But this is a practical choice that I had to make and is, in my opinion, an interesting exercise.
Let’s look first at Puzzle #2. With the addition of a queen on the white side, white’s position is overwhelming in spite of the permitted illegal move. Absent a horrific series of blunders, white will still win the game. Therefore, the move that perhaps seems the most obvious to you — RxK?? — is actually the worst move on the board and a horrible blunder!
We have received some new information about the position. The information is that Yahoo! chess is programmed with at least one bug. It allows en passant to move into check. It is quite reasonable to further infer that it would allow a king capture without ending the game. The correct solution to Puzzle #2 is any rook move that takes the king out of check, in the hope to reset the game to normal parameters (or perhaps any legal move at all other than Qd3, Qf3, or Qf5 will work). Then white can proceed as normal to win easily.
Now let’s look at Puzzle #3. With the addition of a black queen, white was already hopelessly lost and his position has not materially worsened with the illegal en passant. Here I feel that there are two possible solutions, depending on your perspective.
The first possibility is KxR. The logic is as follows. You, as white, were playing on in a hopelessly lost position, just on the off chance that black would horribly blunder. While the blunder here was not at all what you would have had in mind, and the move should not have been allowed, it does present the opportunity you were hanging around for. Furthermore, according to the norms of street chess a hanging king can be captured, ending the game immediately, rather than the illegal move being identified and corrected. Per street chess norms this would be a clean win. You can capture the King. And then if that doesn’t cause the game to end, you can resign as you were losing any way.
The second possible solution here is the immediate resigns, 0-1. The chess program has glitched, badly, resulting in an illegal position. Since your position was hopelessly lost already, the honorable solution is to resign.
The Capture
Returning to my game, you can see now why my choice was more fraught. I had gone from a winning position to one that would be losing if I didn’t capture the king. This felt quite unfair, as I’m sure you’d understand. I captured the king, hoping and expecting to claim victory.
Unfortunately that’s not what happened. The program clearly had no preparation for what to do if a king is captured, as that should have been an outcome prohibited by all of the other rules. It allowed the capture and game play continued. So now I will present to you, as my final puzzle, the resulting position:
Puzzle #4 Black to play
Puzzle #4 Solution
I hope that it is immediately apparent to all good and decent people that there is only one acceptable solution to this puzzle: resigns, 1-0. To be sure, black found himself in uncharted waters. But while I am generally unenthusiastic about “unwritten rules of behavior” that people are expected to intuit and follow, I have to say I feel quite strongly about this one: IF WE ARE GOING TO LIVE IN A SOCIETY, YOU SHOULD NOT CONTINUE TO PLAY ON IN A CHESS GAME WHERE YOU ARE DOWN A KING!
The Finish
My opponent, I am sad to say, did not see things the same way. Unburdened by a king to defend, he continued onward. Worse still, he had gained a tremendous time advantage due to the time I had spent, perplexed, thinking about what to do after the illegal move. With no possibility of being checkmated and a big lead on the clock, all my opponent needed to do was to avoid the 50 move rule and manage to not blunder all his material and he would be awarded the win.
As the game progressed towards my inevitable flagging, I imagined his unbridled glee. He was experiencing the ultimate freedom, a radical freedom you and I may never get to experience. He had no fears, no worries, nothing to defend. He had a piece, his rook, which was impossible to trap with the material on the board and could just be shuffled around endlessly. Imagine it, imagine the liberation of playing without your king. Of feeling invincible, invulnerable to checkmate. There’s a part of me that envies him and that experience.
I, on the other hand was miserable. My first hope had been that the king capture would trigger an end-game condition and that I would be awarded the win. My second hope was that he would gracefully resign after the his king was captured when the game didn’t automatically end. My third hope was that he would have his fun, make a handful of moves for awhile, and then do the honorable thing and resign after all. As the moves continued and the time ticked by, it become more and more apparent that he wouldn’t do so. And my moves were defanged of any purpose. I had no target, no monarch to pursue. There was no plan, no strategy possible in such circumstances. It was a state of utter despair, and I felt like I was howling into a nihilistic void. The last sliver of control available to me would have been to resign before flagging but I couldn’t do it, not under those circumstances. Eventually my time ran out and he was declared the winner.
Final Thoughts
I think about this opponent sometimes. What has become of his life? Did he find love and build a family? Does he teach his children right from wrong? Is he an upstanding citizen in his community, or has he taken a darker path? Does he still remember this game, harboring a deep secret shame about his opportunistic misdeeds that he will carry to his grave? I don’t know the answer to these questions. But I suspect he’s out there, living his life, going unpunished for this great crime against chess.
Notes:
*A move such as this calls out for a new annotation symbol. I define “?!?” to mean, “an unusual and nearly incomprehensible move that cannot be accurately evaluated in the absence of further context.