Artistic License – Chess

"Marcus, wrong game."

Chess is one of the oldest games known to mankind and one of the very most popular ones. Almost everyone has heard of it and can recognize some of the pieces. That said, not everyone plays chess or even understands how the game is supposed to be played. Sadly, that group seems to include the majority of writers.

When chess is portrayed in media, the depiction tends to be flawed in one way or another. These offences include, but are in no way limited to:

• Illegal moves.^note Often the writers will have their characters make moves that simply aren't allowed under the standard set of rules. The most common of these is taking the opponent's King, which simply can't happen in a game of chess. (Toppling a King as a symbolic gesture can be done after the game's ended, but it isn't a common custom. Most players will opt for simply shaking their opponent's hand instead)
• The absence of draws and surrenders.^note According to most studies, about half of professional games end with a draw. Of those that end with one player winning, most will end with the losing party surrendering long before getting mated — many chess players even consider playing until the very end to be impolite, since it implies lack of faith in the opponent's skill. Yet in the land of fiction, nearly every game of chess will end up with one of the players performing a checkmate... or taking their opponent's King.
• Impossibly short games.^note While it is technically possible to checkmate your opponent in as little as two moves, it requires said opponent to make very specific, awful moves. Regardless of how good you are, if your opponent is at least somewhat skilled, they will be able to hold off against you for at least a dozen moves.
• The board has been set up wrong.^note At the start of each game, the pieces have to stand on their designated tiles. If the White King is not on a black tile and vice versa, it means the board was set up wrong.
• The absence of clocks at tournaments.^note While it's not strictly necessary to play chess, every remotely serious chess tournament will provide clocks to the players, as otherwise every player would have the option to always avoid defeat by refusing to make a move. Despite that, chess clocks are rarely seen in fiction, even for high-class tournaments.

If the story depicts beginners playing chess, those errors can be written off as intentional on the author's part. If the players are supposed to be experienced — which they usually are, considering the main purpose of depicting chess in media — this is just Artistic License or intentional use of symbolism.

A Sub-Trope of Artistic License – Sports, and a Super-Trope to Surprise Checkmate. See Variant Chess for when a chess game is not meant to be a regular one in the first place.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Code Geass is rather notorious for this. Whenever Lelouch plays chess or uses chess metaphors, he presents complete ignorance of how the game is supposed to be played. Most notably, he starts each game by moving his King — which is impossible if the pieces are arranged correctly.
  • This is possibly due to the writers having been more familiar with shogi, which is distantly related to chess but which has a different board and starting arrangement where the king piece can be moved first.
• An intentional example in No Game No Life, where Kurami challenges the duo to what seems to be a game of chess, but it quickly becomes clear something is very wrong with it, flabbergasting the chess prodigy Shiro. In reality, the actual game being played is less chess and more of a Real-Time Strategy using chess pieces as units, on top of the pieces seemingly being sentient.
• In Sailor Moon episode 71, Ami and Berthier replay the real-life 1972 game between Spassky and Fischer. The match places Berthier in the role of Spassky and Ami in the role of Fischer. The Match portrayed is round 5 of 21 and appears to continue as normal up until the point at which Spassky should have resigned. After which an utterly rookie mistake is made by Berthier which is quickly countered by Ami. After the cutaway for the peanut gallery to cheer, the match has suddenly shifted over a dozen — at the minimum — moves into the future for a rather weak-looking checkmate due to the camera angle.

Comic Strips

• Parodied in a strip of For Lack of a Better Comic, where Ned Stark insists on only using his king and no other pieces.
• FoxTrot:
  • Jason once won a chess game with only a single move after his father moved one pawn. This is impossible; the fastest capable checkmate requires four moves minimum.
  • Played within the February 7, 2010 strip as seen above Jason and his friend Marcus add new stuff to the game, making his sister remark that they actually found a way to make chess nerdier. (Jason and Marcus know the rules; they purposely added to them.)

Fan Works

• Played for laughs in Code Geass: Awesome of the Rebellion, with two chess games that play absolutely nothing like in real life.
  • In chapter 8, we see Awesome face off with Schneizel, before Suzaku suddenly runs in and places his own pieces on the board, where he puts them is never specified, joining the match. Awesome moves his king first, moves one of his pawns in the middle of Schneizel's turn, and eventually wins by having his king reach the end of the board.
  • In chapter 13, Awesome takes on The Emprah in a round of Human Chess at the UN. We see Awesome take out one of The Emprah guys on the first move, The Emprah straight up having some of his team shooting at Awesome's team, and Dick Cheney using a crossbow and getting an extra move because he got a headshot. Later, we even see Awesome drawing cards to get benefits and The Emprah rolling a D20 to determine the results of a ploy.
• In Dahlia Hawthorne Escape from Pirson's tenth chapter, we see a ridiculously inaccurate chess game, with one character even making a Shout-Out to the above-mentioned Awesome of the Rebellion. It starts with Frollo challenging Edgeworth to a chess game. Before the match starts, Hitler shows up and puts down his own pieces to assist Frollo, upon which Blackquill and Shakespeare show up and each add their own pieces to help Edgeworth. Once the game itself starts, we see Edgeworth move half his pawns forward on the first turn, apparently keeping the other half behind to guard against a bombing, Frollo moving both his bishops at once, Hitler having his pawns trying to shoot Blackquill's knight, which is later revealed to be a decoy. Eventually, a headless Stalin puts down his own pieces for the villainous side, to which Shakespeare objects, and his Big Word Shout apparently knocks all the villains' pieces off the board, which is said to cause them to lose.
• In the Ghostbusters fanfic Your Move, Egon and Ray play "strip chess", whereupon every time a pawn gets taken they have to take a sip of beer, and every time a non-pawn gets taken, they have to strip. However, there are only eight pawns in a game, and one can't get drunk off eight sips of beer.
• In the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls fanfic Long Road to Friendship, when Twilight concedes a casual match in a mall, her opponent Sunset Shimmer refuses to let Twilight concede.

Films — Animation

• Aladdin has a scene in which Genie and the carpet are playing chess with each other. Not only is the White King missing — which is not possible under any circumstances — the board itself contains only 49 squares, which would make the game simply unplayable.

Films — Live-Action

• 2001: A Space Odyssey: HAL, playing chess with Bowman, gets a few details mixed up, but it's a very subtle error that could only be spotted by a chess wizard. It can also be taken as Foreshadowing that something's very, very, very wrong with HAL.
• Captain America: Civil War briefly shows a chessboard in The Avengers Tower. It is set incorrectly, as the white and black pieces don't appear to be standing on their designated tiles.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Harry starts out as the white-square bishop but clearly delivers checkmate while traveling on a black square diagonal. While his starting square is not directly shown, the king-side white bishop always starts on a white square. The closing moves of the chess game were designed by chessmaster Jeremy Silman (who explains the move order here). However, the scene as filmed has Harry simply checkmate the White King after Ron's defeat, rather than the full route where Harry puts White King in check, White Queen retreats to defend White King, and then Harry captures White Queen and puts White King in checkmate.
• Husk: Scott is the resident nerd and is identified as a member of the chess team to establish him as the smart member of the group. He uses a chess board he finds in the Old, Dark House to make a chess analogy to explain how the Scary Scarecrow operates. Unfortunately, the move he describes is not part of the rules of chess.
• The Seventh Seal: during the famous Chess with Death scene, the chessboard is actually set up backwards, with the upper right square of the chessboard being white and not black.

Literature

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: The chess game depicted in Through the Looking-Glass plays fast and loose with the rules (though this can possibly be chalked up to it taking place in a dream).
  • The two sides are dubbed White and Red, even though — regardless of the actual colours of the pieces — they are always White and Black in real life.
  • The sides don't alternate moves properly (it's mostly "Alice moves, then someone else does". In total, White takes 13 moves^note  or 12 if you count the Queen's first two moves as one — she does keep on moving in the same direction, after all while Red takes three.
  • When the Red Queen moves to the space next to Alice near the end, for the examination of her fitness to be a Queen, she places the White King in check. Neither side acknowledges this, and the next move is the White Queen moving to KR6 (when she disappears into the soup tureen), which, since it does nothing to uncheck the king, is an illegal move. Carroll scholar Martin Gardner suggests that the Red Queen's first line after her move — "Speak when you're spoken to!" — explains the lack of acknowledgment: since neither side can speak until someone else speaks first, and there are only two sides, they can't announce check.
  • Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you realize that the residents of Looking-Glass World are playing what's known as fairy chess, a form of the game wherein the rules, pieces, and winning conditions are changed. One such variation is that one side can make as many moves as they want until the other side tells them to stop, which would explain why Alice, and by extension the White pieces, are free to move frequently.
• Artemis Fowl: In The Arctic Incident, it's said that one of Artemis's disguises is as a teen chess prodigy, bolstered by the fact that when a checkpoint official who happened to be a chess grandmaster doubted him, Artemis trounced him easily. All well and good, but the text claims Artemis won in only six moves — highly improbable against even a vaguely competent player, much less a grandmaster.
• Played for Laughs in the Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Also People, where the Doctor plays chess with Kadiatu, with the stipulation " 'First person to predict the precise number of moves to the first possible checkmate wins". The Doctor wins the second game by predicting Kadiatu can mate in twelve, which is Exact Words to the agreement, but not violating how chess works. Then he starts predicting before she even moves, which is. The point seems to be that, as with "Curse of Fenric" below, the Seventh Doctor is The Chessmaster, but he doesn't achieve that by following the rules.
• The chess scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone makes it obvious that J. K. Rowling has never touched a chessboard in her life. For example, Ron at one point is said to take "one step forward", despite the fact that he is playing a knight (this error and some others were fixed in later reprintings).

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In the story "The Curse of Fenric", the solution to the chess problem that the Doctor sets Fenric (which is never seen in detail) is for the pawns on each side to unite. This has metaphorical significance in the story but is nonsense from a chess perspective. Justifiable if you think that the Doctor was simply using the chess problem to get Fenric to waste its time and not notice what he was really up to.
• Endeavour: During the chess tournament in "Games", one of the display chessboards we see has the black queen and king on the wrong coloured squares.
• Family Ties: the episode where Alex plays chess against a Russian is an interesting case. They actually got many of the details right, including the use of the chess clock. But the presence of live commentary in the same room was more than a little silly, Alex's whole moral dilemma for the episode is created by ignoring the sealed-move rule for adjournments, and of course, for some reason, the Russian who suddenly decides he wants to lose can't simply do so by resigning.
• The Flash: in one episode, Dr. Wells and Hartley Rathaway (the Pied Piper) are playing chess in a flashback. Hartley puts Wells in Check, and Wells immediately puts Hartley in checkmate. 1) Wells should only be able to do that if securing the checkmate also blocks the piece threatening his king. ^note To be fair, we never see Wells' King and he may have saved his King in the same move for all we know 2) We see a close-up of the chess board where Hartley's King is, and it's pretty much physically impossible for him to be in checkmate given the pieces we see.
• Henry and Abe's chess game in the Forever (2014) pilot is a weird one. There are no kings on the board and the position is unusual in other ways, but most unusually, they're playing on a 9x9 board.
• House: Averted, hand-shaking and all. Of course, the Patient of the Week is one of the contestants, and his first showing symptom was that he leaped over the table and beat his opponent to a pulp with the clock, but that's neither here nor there.
  • House's game against the patient Nate gets a few things wrong. House calls Nate's opening "Bird's Opening - sign of a coward", to which Nate responds "Sicilian defense - sign of an idiot". The Bird's Opening is an unpopular, aggressive opening and so ill-advised that it's odd to call it cowardly. House's counter is by definition not the Sicilian because it follows the Bird's. The actual game is very realistic and is a modified version of a game between German players Siegbert Tarrasch and Bernhard Richter from 1883.
• Joan of Arcadia: Joan joins the chess club and beats her first opponent in only a few moves in what he thinks is an ingenious display of lateral thinking, but is actually a fluke. Realistically it couldn't be either. There's nothing lateral about noticing you're able to checkmate your opponent; a fluke would be possible against an equally inept opponent, but a competent player would never make a move that would open themselves up to checkmate.
• Malcolm in the Middle: An episode had a chess scene where Malcolm set up the white pieces on the board but put the king and queen on the wrong squares.
• The Mentalist: In "Days of Wine and Roses", while playing chess with himself, Jane moves the white queen and incorrectly announces a checkmate, as the black knight would take the queen in the next move.
• Monk:
  • In "Mr. Monk and the Genius", a girl plays chess in the park and makes the first move while playing with the black pieces.
  • There's nothing technically wrong about the game between Monk and Sharona in "Mr. Monk Goes Back to School", but the position is pretty weird.
• The Office (US): One episode had Jim with both of his bishops on white squares.
• Thoroughly averted in The Queen's Gambit, with the showrunners hiring Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini as consultants, and care was taken that every shot of a chess board is set in a believable game layout, and the actors were coached to understand the meaning of the moves they made. Some artistic licence is taken with the structure of tournaments, with players playing each other only once, and not having matches ending in draws.
• Smart Guy: A particular episode made just about every error you ever see, as well as a few completely new ones. In addition to having the board set up wrong, there was one scene where the black player made the opening move, and the protagonist's solution to defeating an advanced chess computer was to make completely nonsensical moves, which would have never worked in real life. (In fact, the move that was deemed to be "nonsensical" was moving the knight out first, which, according to chessgames.com's database, is actually the third most popular opening move among professional players, out of 20 possible opening moves, making this not even wrong).
• Star Trek suffers from this whenever chess comes up. While the rules of 3-D chess are more complex than the rules of regular chess, there is no reason that Counselor Troi should be able to win against Data by making irrational moves.
• Supergirl: There's an absolute disaster of a match between Lena and Lana Luthor. They move illegally and sometimes simultaneously, reintegrate captured pieces, and even swap colors.
• Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!: Briefly parodied in the series 5 episode 3: Re-Animated, where the layout of pieces and the 'checkmate' is clearly wrong.

Video Games

• The Case Of The Golden Idol: The scenario "The Interrupted Weekend at the Doctor's Salon" features a rather strange chess game. A black pawn is on the back row, both white bishops are on black squares and both black bishops are on white squares. This is a clue about the skill of the players.
• Continuing the trend of the book and film, the video game adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone ignores the actual rules of chess in the level based on the chess game. All the pieces move one square at a time, making the differences between them purely cosmetic. When you, as Harry, move to another square, the other pieces all move in your direction. If a piece ever gets close enough, it kills you, which is a Game Over. If two pieces of different colors end up next to each other, they kill each other. Your goal is to get all the other pieces to kill each other, leaving the board safe to cross.
• Kingdom Hearts: The chess board that Xehanort and Eraqus were repeatedly seen using in their teenage years is literally unplayable. Other than the fact it places the squares diagonally instead of in straight lines, it has more squares than a normal chessboard, and the squares do not follow the proper black-and-white sequence. It is straight-up impossible to play chess on that thing.
• Safe Cracker: The original game has a book about cheating in chess. The book depicts an example of "minimal and discrete" cheating where one player has fourteen queens.

Webcomics

• Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff: Comic 42, "chess" exaggerates this to hell and back in the name of Stylistic Suck. The board is a pentagon, with a mix of triangular and rectangular spaces, and the pieces are scattered haphazardly across it. The white king is completely absent. The game ends with Sweet Bro grabbing a white "pewn", walking into the bathroom, throwing the piece in the toilet, and declaring "check mate". Hella Jeff at least has the presence of mind to dispute the legality of that move.
  Hella Jeff: pawns don't DOO that you chumpstick. [sic]

Western Animation

• The Batman: In "Q&A", a chess tournament is seen in which competitor Yelena Klimanov orders her bishop moved one square up and two squares right. This is a move that is legal for a knight, but not for a bishop.
• Bluey: An In-Universe example; in the episode "Chest", Bingo moves both a knight and a pawn at the same time to Bandit's side of the board. When Bandit tells her she can't do that, she says that her knight is taking the pawn on a playdate with Bandit's knight because they're all friends. Bandit then tries to explain that this isn't how the game works.
• Futurama: Played for Laughs when one of two robots playing chess declares "Mate in 137 moves!" from the opening position.
• Geri's Game: Most of the moves are legal, save obviously for the last one where "White" Geri wins by flipping the board around and switching his and "Black" Geri's pieces.
• One of the Looney Tunes cartoons made to accompany Looney Tunes: Back in Action is "Grand Master Rabbit". Daffy Duck plays Cecil Turtle in a chess game and moves his white king several squares, deep into the black ranks, and declares checkmate. Cecil tries consulting a rule book, but Daffy isn't having it. Kings only move one square at a time, and rarely venture into enemy territory unless almost all other pieces are gone. Daffy's next opponent is Wile Coyote, who's somehow playing without his king, since it was thrown by Daffy in a fit of pique. Bugs Bunny adds the missing king next to Daffy's king, upon which Wile declares checkmate. There is no way to checkmate a king with the opposing king, nor can anyone simply plunk a new piece on the board mid-game. When Bugs Bunny becomes Daffy's next opponent, his first move is checkmate, on a 7 x 6 chessboard. A correct chessboard is 8 x 8 squares, and white needs a minimum of three moves to effect a Fool's Mate. Perhaps, in addition to Toon Physics, there's also Toon Rules. Only one of these cartoons ever saw a theater: "Pullet Surprise"; the rest were mothballed when the film bombed.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Hack-San", Markov is shown playing a couple of games of chess while refereeing Alix and Kim's latest dare; the board is shown with a black square in the bottom right when it should be white on right. In addition, the pawn move shown is not a checkmate.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: An episode had the characters trying to play chess. Rabbit, the only one who knows anything about the game at all, points out that "some" of the pieces are missing — from the way he describes it, it sounds like he only expects there to be one of each kind, to begin with. And also a magician. This is ultimately all in service of them "playing the missing pieces" — yep, this turns out to be an RPG Episode, complete with Tigger as "the Bish-Hop of Bounce" and Rabbit as the Inept Mage. This one's justified in that the citizens of the Hundred Acre Wood are frequently shown to not understand "real world" games and fill in the gaps in their knowledge with guesses.
• Xiaolin Showdown: The climactic chess battle of "Oil in the Family" follows no rules of real chess at all, especially with the final move where Raimundo seemingly moves dozens of pieces at once.

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Remind me again, how the little horse-shaped ones move.