I saw her today at the hotel,
A big tournament underway.
I knew I was gonna put her in checkmate.
I could tell by the way she played.
Now you can’t castle when you’re in check.
You can’t castle when you’re in check.
You can’t castle when you’re in check.
But if you look sometimes,
You just might find,
You can capture the piece.
She first pinned my rook with her bishop.
She then made a threat with a pawn.
Oh man, you should have seen her expression,
When I captured the pawn en passant.
Now you can’t castle when you’re in check.
You can’t castle when you’re in check.
You can’t castle when you’re in check.
But if you look sometimes,
You just might find,
You can capture the piece.
Walked down to the hotel drugstore
To get her prescription filled
We were standing in line with Mr. Bobby
He said she looked pretty ill
“Her complexion is cherry red.”
I showed the game to Mr. Bobby
Yeah, and he said one word to me, and that was “dead.”
I said to him:
Now you can’t castle when you’re in check.
You can’t castle when you’re in check.
You can’t castle when you’re in check.
But if you look sometimes,
You just might find,
You can capture the piece.
For this you would invite a lawsuit from ABKCO? Bittersweet Symphony of Lame.
Here’s something worse! Try this in the shower - think Italian-American crooners c. 1960
Ee four
Cee five
Knight eff three
Dee six
It’s a simple Sicilian song
Dee four
Cee Dee
Knight dee four
Knight eff six
Try to mate me all night long
Knight cee three
Eh six
You create
Such a fix
In the honeymoon suite at the Waldorf
You want us to look at the (phonetic) Nigh-dorf
Bee gee five
Ee six
Eff four
Queen bee six
You have eaten
My poisoned pawn
Then you break
My attack
Counterplay’s
What I lack
In our simple Sicilian song
When you open
You flirt
In the end
You convert
In the honeymoon suite at the Waldorf
You seem too obsessed with the Nigh-dorf
I came in and walked around,
Somebody yelled, Your flag is down,
Mr. Dzindzichashvili,
Mr. Dzindzichashvili,
I wish somebody would tell me what ‘Dzindzichashvili’ means
– from Col. George Sicherman;
after “Diddie Wah Diddie” by Blind Blake (1929)
Back in about 1973, after Col. George Sicherman had come across a collegiate publication that included a game in Smythescript notation, he snail-mailed me with a plea that I submit the notation to FIDE for official approval. His plea included the advice, “Do not be afraid to promote your ideas. Soon the golden crown of success will perch upon your head, as a vulture perches upon a ripe carcass.”
OK, now I get it. Your question is not “why the name?”, but rather, “why the notation?”. Duh.
Well, it’s like this. At a tournament run in an Evanston apartment basement by landlord Cliff King, a chess supporter (a little like Papa Dee), I saw a player using his own home-grown notation. It was basically algebraic, but the files were lettered S through Z instead of A through H. And the rank numbers were placed before the file letters instead of after. Castling short was “!” and castling long was “?”. The notation was no doubt designed to thwart opponents who wanted to see the player’s scoresheet in the middle of the game.
Not wanting to be outdone, I decided I needed to invent a notation that was outlandish beyond belief, that would thwart an opponent even more, and that would represent things in a way contrary to expectations. So I chose numerals to represent pieces, and letters to represent directions of piece movement. The eight directions of possible movement for a king or queen (which I also used for rooks and bishops) were the eight letters in C-H-E-L-P-A-T-Z, and the eight directions for knights were the eight letters in T-U-N-A-F-I-S-H. By introducing a few other letters (like K for capture and W for check), I added another feature I found desirable, namely the great variety in the number of symbols required to represent a move. For example, the single letter K would suffice if there was only one legal capture, or W if there was only one legal check, or KW if there was only one legal capture with check (but multiple captures and multiple checks). By contrast, other moves would require five symbols, such as 5XXT3 for “second rook moves in the T direction 3 squares”. My dream was complete!
Of course Col. Sicherman set out to write an explanation of the notation which was as difficult to figure out as the notation itself. Kind of like the FIDE definition of a knight move, as “a move to a square as close as possible to the departure square but not on the same rank, file, or diagonal as the departure square”. What person, not already knowing how the knight moves, would figure it out by reading that description? Ah yes, deliberate obfuscation.