I have taken a page out of the complete idiot’s guide to Hollywood productions: if you have the material for a strong movie that’s going to be popular, don’t make it. Instead, split it up. So here’s yet another blog post about the same episode of Cheers as last week. Then, our hero, the dude with the horizontal bar on his t-shirt, almost saved the day by jumping in from the sideline, but his efforts were ultimately in vain due to poor implementation on the part of the comic relief sidekick..Can he beat the empire this time around?
The first position — that is to say, the second one, but the first after last week’s instalment — is this one:1
although the absence of the white h1 rook was inferred from its presence next to the board. How white managed to misplace it remains a mystery. He has no attack to speak of as compensation. Sure, there’s a knight and queen in the general vicinity of the black king, but they’re not producing any threats. Nevertheless, a passing waitress tells him that his king’s about to get mated. How? Is an extra queen going to fly in? Well, that wouldn’t even be enough to force anything like a quick mate.2 We don’t get to see the end of this game, but judging the player’s skills from last week’s post, that’s a good thing.
And we do get to see yet another position. The same opponents can be spotted at work again some five minutes later, this time in the following position:
Here, in this position that’s utterly lost for him, bar dude’s opponent goes into a prolonged and rather awkward spiel about how he has been going easy on him but how he, now, will teach him a lesson..He accompanies his braggadocio by Rxh1 — a move of refined and hard to rival stupidity. Obviously, white replies with Bxc7#.
I think he must have been at the bar for a long, long time.
Realism: 1/5 & 1/5 Neither position is impossible, but that’s all there’s to say for them.
Probable winner: The dude with the horizontal bar on his t-shirt, since he appears to be endowed with a working brain cell.
1. [And this two.] ↩
2. [A small challenge to the reader: what is the minimum amount of extra pieces you need to add in order for white to have, say, a mate in 3?] ↩