Pac-Man Chess Tetris

Fruit mugger, wood pusher, brick juggler

Organizational skills: 10/10 😁

A round of feltris. And a game of pac-man, between Botvinnik and Tartakower. Ah no, it's chess. There is no escape tunnel between h4 and h5.

Clever use of vertical space, and interesting mirror-ific composition. Creative!

I actually played a dozen rounds of tetris a couple of days ago, and in the last game entered the zone and could just play. The tetrominoes, the seven assemblies of four squares falling down to fit together in the game of tetris can be shown with chess pieces on them. Here is the least assuming, the four squares forming a square. On the last picture I applied 'rotate the piece' to the photo, to get in some tetris gravity

Chessmen are: a) old Brazilian on their board with lifted edge (frame), b) idiosyncratic mix of unknown origin on almost monochrome board, c) old onion top set, arguably from southern Germany, on a tourist, 2000s, khatam board, d) very old, rugged Russian pieces on their folding board.

Position taken from Timman-Karpov, Amsterdam 1976. A variant presented live during the game by Hans Ree that Timman later included in a book: Had Karpov not played 13. .. Nd5-e7 but 13. .. Nd7-e5 instead, then white would try 14. f2-f4 (photos). The variant continuing 14. .. Nxe3 15. Qh5+ g6 16. Bxg6+ Nxg6 17. f5 Nxf1 18. fg Qxg5 19. g7+ Qxh5 20. ghQ+ followed by 21. Rxf1 and a winning attack.

Seems like the only moment I am studying now is when I look for a position to post a chess set in

Look at the livelihood of these pieces, vulnerable and strong.

It is a good thing for GM Timman that GM Karpov missed the superior move 13..Nd7-e5!. As GM Karpov would have punished Hans Ree's fantasy variation. As 14. f2-f4? is refuted by 14..Ng6! with a winning position.

The full game:

"Kasparov, Karpov and Timman on OZ Voorburgwal during visit to Amsterdam, 28 April 1987"
The four players that came to Amsterdam in 1976 to celebrate Euwe's 75th birthday with a double round-robin sat down like this:

Karpov and Timman with Fridrik Olafsson and Walter Browne.

Thank you for the line, Desperate, and thank you for the full game, Pamvo. Hans Ree was sure in his prime in those days, so, a 'fantasy' line is still top Timman writes, recalling the post mortem of the game, that Karpov said he dismissed the move 13. .. Nd7-e5 because (instead of Ree's 14. f4) he feared 14. Qh5+ g6 15. Bxg6 Nxg6 16. Bxf6, but had missed his own resource 16. .. 0-0. For 14. f4 Karpov spontaneously said 14. .. Nf7.

Timman writes, the two of them dug intensely into the position at move 13, and that the complications after 13. Ne2-d4 Nd7-e5 14. f4 would have been hard to calculate. So, I think, in pre-engine times Ne5 just would not have been conceived as superior and f4 would not have gotten a question mark.

Here's to the set again:

(Position from Shirov-Ivanchuk (rapid) 1/2-1/2, Tallinn 1996, after 9. Bg5)

Found the old box painted with flowers for it.

b7 is one fine substitute pawn

Robert Capa photo, Moscow 1947, showing kids in a park playing with the "svelte" "mushroom" set.

The pieces are tall and weighted. Did you ever see them used in a tournament?

Playing with figurative chess pieces is great, it just adds a memory game within the game and is less serious. Only most of them are not made for play or are making you smile. This tourist set from Mali fulfills both conditions for me. If these 'big five' sets have no tradition, as I believe, players can assign the roles of rhinoceros, elephant and black buffalo freely! Very nice, and they did not get a lot of play during the last few decades or so in Germany- yet Just one of the little hippos got a bit chewed by a dog.

So I'm posting this, I was close to throwing it away once, but I kept it, because it is my first travel chess set and I actually played with it, not often, though, I remember losing when I first brought it, in a school break to my classmate Wasilios to an early Qh5 g6 Qxe5+ and Qxh8 tactic, maybe we took it to Denmark in the early eighties and I played kind of a match with my dad when on family vacation, but we could have taken our big board, really.. I still think it was this set and it was like 6:5 or 5:6 a real close match on this tiny board with the uneven plastic and the black and white pieces hiding on the black and white squares, playing in the dunes at the sea, in the evening on the porch or inside, when it rained.

In those days, we were under the impression of the Karpov-Kortchnoi matches, Robert Hübner was playing. Especially vividly I remember the BBC series 'The master game' that was dubbed into German. There they had these little squares with the filmed grandmasters thinking out loud next to a diagram- which was actually a model lit from underneath and operated by puppeteers, a bit of magic.

Gligoric-Short, The Master Game, season 6, 1981

Funny: I just searched it and found a chess.com post on it from just a few days ago!

https://www.chess.com/news/view/bbc-to-broadcast-new-show-chess-masters

¡ Viva España!

Escardibul was a manufacturer of billiards. In the 1920ies they started to make chess sets for the same cafes and bars. They had a chess board with cigarette proof surface.

The burnt olive wood idea I could go without, but that's the way they did it. I like to see it as a mark of toughness, but as a mark of fragility, too. Together with the war paint dark red colour of the black pieces, these chess pieces, among all chess sets I own, are the ones most alluding to real battle. While I generally prefer seeing the ensemble of chess pieces as troupes (circus, theatre) rather than troops, I value here the memento mori. The many little carvings on every piece are decorative and giving a lot of grip. 

For some pieces you need a big board!

6cm squares and a special colour match

Truly a very impressive collection and matching knowledge!