Tuesday 8 June 2021

Yet another non rule

 The start of the local interschool competition always brings with a new set of 'non' rules, that children assure me are the correct rules (at least according to Dad). I in fact got two today, although is quite an old one, long since discarded.

The totally new one, was when a king makes it to the other side of the board you get one of your pawns back. Not quite sure where this even came from, but the possible logic behind it, is that as you cannot promote to a king, a kind of reverse promotion provides compensation for this. 

The very old one was 'bare king'. One of the players claimed a win on the grounds that he had captured all his opponents pieces. I explained to him that the goal in chess is the 'checkmate' your opponent, not just take everything. Fortunately he then proceeded to do this, and scored a point anyway. 

The most audacious attempt to alter the rules was by a 5 year old who simply declared he had won, ran off to the score table to enter the result, and then refused to return to the board to explain exactly why he had won. As you can guess, he did not actually win (and his opponent did)

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