History Main / CrazyPeoplePlayChess

* More generally, most psychiatric facilities will have a few chessboards in the common-room; they're cheap, the pieces are difficult to turn into weapons and the rules are so well-known that it doesn't really matter if the instructions get lost. Patients who've been there for a while are liable to get quite a lot of practice simply because there's not a lot else to do.

->''It's easy to get obsessed with chess.''\\
--Magnus Carlsen, highest rated chess player of all time

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* In a Kurt Vonnegut short story, 16 Americans (including an officer and his family) are captured by a Southeast Asian warlord who lives in a old palace with a people sized chessboard. He's fascinated by the fact that he has these people who he hates and forces them into a game of living chess. The American leader (who admits he's only a fair player) must be the King, but he can put the others anywhere he wants. He makes his wife the Queen, his two small boys the Bishops and the rest as the other pieces. The rules are simple. When the American takes a piece it is removed from the board. When one of the Americans is "taken", he is immediately removed and shot. The American officer is rattled by the first players he has lost but also because he realizes the warlord is not really playing to win, but to take and kill as many people as he can. Then he sees that the warlord's erratic playing has left him vulnerable and he can be tricked into a game losing error - but only if he can get him to move his Queen. To do that he pretends to make a mistake and moves one of his sons into the fatal square. [[spoiler: The boy is "taken" but before he can be shot a sympathetic concubine kills the warlord. The warlord's Russian advisor takes over and allows any taken pieces to live until the game is over. He loses and spares the surviving Americans. In a TV version, it takes place in South or Central America and no one is killed, although they are taken away and a shot fired each time.]]

* ''Film/GreenLantern'' -- Hector Hammond, soon to be infused with yellow fear energy, is first seen playing chess against a computer.

* ''VideoGame/TheWitcher3WildHunt'' has King Radovid V, an increasingly paranoid despot obsessed with chess and [[BurntheWitch hunting sorceresses]]. Fittingly, the first place you meet him is at a chess club where he explains his passion for the game.

* In the MordantsNeed novels checkers (this world doesn't have chess) is used to show the King's disconnect with reality. The kingdom falls apart while King Joyse obsesses over games with his mad adviser Adept Havelock, struggles to grasp his land's predicament with checkers analogies, and even goes out of his way to humiliate a powerful foreign prince for not knowing how to play the game.

** A chess team from Bethlem Mental Asylum (the place that gave us the word "[[BedlamHouse bedlam]]") once defeated a team from Harvard University.

->''No chess grandmaster is normal; they only differ in the extent of their madness.''

There are a few different reasons for this trope. Some writers may genuinely believe it, or may be alluding to specific RealLife players who were known for being a bit off. Others may be trying to develop AnAesop about the dangers of obsessions; the mad player in this case is almost always someone who spends almost all their time in isolation studying the game. There could also be anti-intellectual messages; if [[SmartPeoplePlayChess smart people play chess]] and chess players are nuts, then smart people in general must be crazy.

TropesAreNotBad, of course; if the portrayal is CrazyAwesome, then no harm done.

Expect the effect to be [[UpToEleven greatly intensified]] when certain chess variants are played instead, such as 3D chess, chess with a round board, chess with many new pieces, chess where you can't see your opponents pieces, 4-player chess, and even chess with random (and shifting) rules.

In ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'', [[TheAntichrist Moridin]] is notes to be a mater of his world's variation on chess. He’s also so off his rocker from use of TheDarkSide that [[EvenEvilHasStandards his fellow Forsaken]] admit he’s completely insane.

->''"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do."''
-->-- '''Creator/GKChesterton'''

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->''No chess grandmaster is normal; they only differ in the extent of their madness.''
-->-- '''Viktor Korchnoi''', grandmaster

* "Quarantine", a drabble by ArthurCClarke. Aliens reach earth, and their computers determine that chess will so utterly derange them that the only solution is to blow up the planet.

** Creator/AleisterCrowley, himself a good example of this trope, at one point had the ambition of becoming chess grandmaster, until [[http://hermetic.com/crowley/confessions/chapter16.html he saw some leading chess players up close]]: 'I saw the masters --- one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess.' He did, however, play some decidedly non-serious games. He was particularly noted for his unusual variant on "blindfold chess" - he would disappear into a bedroom with his current girlfriend and call out his moves through a closed door while they were presumably... [[UnusualEuphemism engaged in an activity not traditionally associated with chess.]]

** Bobby Fischer, the 11th world champion. The man who took down the Soviet chess machine. Also a raving anti-semite ([[BoomerangBigot in spite of his Jewish ancestry]]), ConspiracyTheorist who thought that the Soviets (and later, the Jews) were trying to assassinate him or at least screw up his games, and all-around nutjob. [[BasedOnAGreatBigLie Rumor has it]] that Fischer and his opponent Spassky hated each other so much that the championship organizers had to put a board under the chess table to stop them from kicking each other between moves. Various psychological profiles, including one by the [=KGB=], concluded that Fischer was a certifiable [[TheSociopath psychopath]].

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* In one ''ComicStrip/FoxTrot'' strip, Jason and Marcus combine chess with ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons''. ("As if regular chess isn't nerdy enough," sighs Paige.)
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