| Title | From Backwards Boards to King-Flipping, Hollywood Can't Get Chess Right | |
| Date | Wednesday March 22 2017, @11:34PM | |
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| from the i-resign dept. | ||
Movies and television shows are full of blunders, some more noticeable than others, and each with their specific guild of victims. Ornithologists fume when British period dramas are overdubbed with American birdsongs. Government employees will tell you that the supposed main White House staffer in Contact has a nonexistent job. Archeologists hate movie shipwrecks, and marine biologists are already mad about the zombie sharks in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which, as cartilaginous fishes, should not have ribs—even ghostly ones.
But these are merely occasional grievances. There's one group of experts who can barely flip on the television without being exposed to egregious, head-on-desk mistakes: chess players.
"There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film," says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from "20 percent" to "much more often than not," all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don't have to be. "There are so many [errors], it's hard to keep track," says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. "And there are constantly [new ones] coming out."
[...] Peter Doggers of Chess.com notes another Dramatic Checkmate move: the felled king. "Tipping over your king as a way of resigning the game is only done in movies," he says. (See Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Jay Thomas slaps his king down after being owned by Richard Dreyfuss).A normal chess player will just go in for a good-game-style handshake. "This falling king thing has somehow become a strong image in cinematography," he says, "But chess players always think: 'Oh no, there we go again...'"
-- submitted from IRC
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printed from SoylentNews, From Backwards Boards to King-Flipping, Hollywood Can't Get Chess Right on 2024-04-25 00:37:52