Leverage

Did anyone catch the summer finale of this TNT series Sunday night? It was supposed to have a plot about a chess tournament in Dubai.

Yep. An alleged blitz (speed) tournament. Knock out format. Our hero is so good naturally he can beat GMs. His team did some cheating (notes to the opponent from his team right in front of everyone, mirror in the eye of opponents, opponents got to talk with each other, …) but at least he did not use the computer as a partner plot device. Oh yeah, they used those old black battery operated analog chess clocks.

For you cable subscribers you can probably find this episode on channel one.

I don’t normally watch that show, but happened across it by chance.

It was interesting I would say, but there were definite mistakes. Two that jumped out at me were:

  1. A “regular guy” beating 2 Grandmasters.

  2. When they displayed a position on a digital board, the board wasn’t set up correctly. The narrator said Bd6, but the d6 square was a light square!

Other than those annoying things, I thought it was an entertaining show, enhanced by a bunch of people playing chess :smiley:

One would think that there would be a 50-50 chance that the board would be set up correctly (white square at lower right).

Yet, it seems that almost 100% of popular displays (movies, billboards) get it wrong.

So, whenever somebody gets it right, that means there is a high probability of at least some degree of professionalism behind the display.

Bill Smythe

If I ever passed a storefront where the critical position of the Byrne-Fischer was set up, I would definitely go in and try to talk to the person who set it up.

It would also be nice to be able to understand the dialog in a movie when they are talking about chess.

Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen playing chess in “The Thomas Crowne Affair” was interesting and fit the plot. Unfortunately, the remake with Rene Russo skipped the chess scene. It was always fascinating how John Wayne worked chess games into some of his western movies. Of course, the best scene of all is Humphrey Bogart sitting at a chessboard at the beginning of “Casablanca.” On the board is a positon from the French Defense; appropriate foreshadowing of what was to come. He held the chess piece in a way that you could tell that he was an avid player. Way too few movies get it right.

I bet this is confirmation bias.