Last night (well early hours of this morning actually; it’s nearly 2AM) I decided to play a buddy of mine at a game of chess. That’s my travel board and (nice German crafted) pieces in the picture. First game was good. It went for about 30 minutes, and then I started to lose interest a little bit and decided to take a risk and make a run for mate. I queued it up and had a good decoy to lure my opponent into helping me queue up the mate setting. It worked. He threw a spanner into the works because I wasn’t focussing on where he was able to move his queen, but I was still 1 move away from mate so I did check mate rather than defending mate own position (yay!).

2nd game is where it got interesting. My opponent messed up by moving his queen out too early, and I cornered it and took it. I also got a bonus bishop in the process. After that I basically took over the board. It ended up that I had taken all bar one knight, one bishop and rook and 3 pawns and I hadn’t even had to open up my king side of the board yet! I was in a position to take his rook and bishop anyway. We were both tired and he made his next move. I moved my queen out and took his rook. And then his bishop. And then I set to work taking his pawns and setting him up with my queen and my two bishops. Funny part? I wasn’t moving my queen; I was moving my king as if it was the queen! Neither of us noticed until I stopped and took a little longer for my move to figure out the mate movement. He had so much confidence in me playing correctly after winning the game that he trusted my moves and failed to check me.

So, to cheat at chess, just win the first game fairly and the other player will hold a false sense of confidence in you so that you can have your run of the board rules as you see fit! Actually I didn’t intend on cheating, we were just so tired that neither of us noticed. Suffice to say we both counted that game as my loss