Never before have I been so quick! Our subject for today — and today is November 3rd, 2020 — is an advertisement scanned from the November 1st edition of De Zondag, a Flemish periodical which appears every Sunday. The ad appears on the front page and says Investing in real estate too complicated? To illustrate the concept of complexity, which is deemed to complicated to let loose on the public without some sort of visual cue,1 a gigantic chessboard is shown with a man in business attire ineffectually — and stupidly — pushing against a knight’s head.
Now, this is already a highly immoral deception, for I am convinced, although I have no definite proof, that this is not actually a picture taken of a guy on an enormous chessboard but rather the result of photoshopping some rando on a normal-sized board! Unacceptable!
And how about the position? Is at least that more or less decent? Well, no. Of course not. They got the colour of a1 wrong, as we have come to expect from these kind of adverts. Here’s the position after some colour correction:2
I have left out the white king, because he has been knocked over and is lying groggy on the floor with his foot on d2. The most likely explanation for this is that it was on c2 and rolled against the pawn when toppled.
The rest of the position is a lot harder to explain. What compelled white’s dark-square bishop to hide on a1? What happened to all the pawns? Why is white’s d-pawn one of the precious few survivors? Why does it look like black never castled but opted for Kd8 instead?
Apparently, the idea behind their slogan is something like: “You think investing in real estate too complex? Even we can do it — and look! We’re idiots!”
Realism: 3/5 A three?! For a position you implicitly called idiotic? I’m afraid so, yes. After all, I gave a two last week and this is miles better. It’s still bad, though.
Probable winner: Black. It looks like white has resigned and even if he hasn’t he’s still down a boatload of pieces.
1. [I was tempted to write that this deeming is probably correct given the Zondag audience, but I’m really not sure that’s true.] ↩
2. [Invest in some chess real estate.] ↩