I Became a Chess Detective! | Playing ChessGuessr

Rumor has it, Naycir is a pretty decent GeoGuessr player. She can locate Bhutan in 2 seconds, spot questionable busses in Denmark yet still struggles while deciding whether a place is in South Africa or Eswatini (the answer is always Eswatini). Inspired by a chess book named The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by philosopher and logician Raymond M. Smullyan who uses a method called retrograde analysis, one day, she had this not-so-crazy idea to merge her skills in GeoGuessr with her passion of chess. Thus a new game was born: ChessGuessr.

Rules of the game are pretty simple. You check the position after White's 10th move and try to guess the opening and figure out who won the game. So, I sent a link for my followers to submit some games on my discord server and received quite a few submissions. In this video, I explored Theo's game!

The position after White's 10th move!

My first instinct was that this game wasn't an e4 or d4 opening purely judging by the placement of the pawns on e3 and d3. As we all know, pawns are like bad words, once moved, they cannot be moved back.

However, there was something fishy about the position. Both sides were missing their dark squared bishops, White's f pawn and Black's c and d pawns were missing. With chat's help we figured out this might be a "gambit" although my personal belief that Theo wouldn't play gambits (the joke was on me!). There were even some pretty logical move suggestions in the chat!

I did this detailed detective work during my live stream at twitch.tv/naycir.

My trust in Theo being a non-gambit type of player was completely wrong (not judged) and after understanding this reality, I was able to identify his opening choice and the result of the game. The entire process can be found in my YouTube video, hope you enjoy it enough to give it a like! 

If you want to see a particular chess content on my channel, make sure to post your recommendations down below and give a thumbs up for the video! It really encourages me to create more content. 💖

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