Xanatos Speed Chess - Television Tropes & Idioms

Kurata from Digimon Savers seemed to be very good at this, often losing individual battles to the heroes (after nearly defeating them to begin with) but always having some sort of backup plan that would ensure his ultimate victory.
Attempted and failed by Zao in Sandland.
Light Yagami from Death Note, when things first started to get out of hand. It didn't last. Misa forced more Speed Chess on him than anyone else, sometimes by being smarter than he expected but usually by being impulsive. Before long, however, Light could flawlessly predict even her actions.
- L was also good at Speed Chess, but not as good as Light. A major unexpected twist once left L at a loss for weeks, although arguably this was simply due to not knowing all the details of Kira's power.
- Near and Mello are also masters of this trope. The entire series can be summed up as Xanatos Speed Chess on crack.
Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass does this out of necessity, because the writers just love screwing all of his plans by unexpected events that no sane person would ever consider. Off the top of my head, I can think of the time he turned the tables when pitted against the Britannian military and their Chinese allies right after losing his best fighter and a large part of his army.
- He plays Speed Chess (as well as normal chess) against his brother Schneizel at the end of R2, and they are evenly matched.
According to Gundam 00's World Report Book, Veda seems to operate in this manner, allowing for deviations to the original plan that are caused by unknown factors, if it manages to be in line with the same end result.
Bleach has Urahara and Aizen. The latter in particular never seems to have his plans turn out exactly as he had originally planned them, however, he always makes sure that he gets what he's after in the end.
- Specifically with the latter, twice now on the eve of what would normally be a huge "all according to plan" moment else where he complains about how much additional work it took and still failed to meet expectations.
Detective Conan has a fair amount of it, especially whenever Conan's directly up against the Black Ops and needs to not get killed.
Marshall D. Teach of One Piece, also known as "Blackbeard", appears to have a fully-formed plan in mind with which to reach the top of the pirate world. Despite a reckless streak, he has shown himself to be highly adept at taking advantage of unexpected opportunities to progress this plan and acting quickly when something appears to threaten it.

Reformed Flash villain Trickster, being blackmailed by another villain to steal a relic from a museum, set up an elaborate plot to convince that villain to leave him alone. When Impulse confronted him with the fact that a museum employee was being unjustly blamed for the theft, Trickster adapted the plan to ensure that the employee appeared a hero, saving his job by getting him to catch the crooks, even though the relic was lost. (Trickster took the opportunity to return it to the church he had stolen it from. I told you he had reformed.)
At the end of Incredible Hercules's "Sacred Invasion", Athena's plan has the unexpected consequence of putting deicidal supervillain Amatsu-Mikaboshi in command of an army of hundreds of intergalactic slave-gods. This is good news, apparently.
Sleeper (along with its prequel Point Blank) by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips is pretty much built out of this trope, with Tao and Lynch using ever more convoluted plans to entrap each other and manipulate Double Agent Holden (who has plans of his own).

In the ironically-named A Perfect Murder, Michael Douglas' relatively simple plot to arrange for his cheating wife to be killed by her lover is quickly derailed when the wife kills her attacker, only to have it be revealed to not be the lover after all. The rest of the film consists of his ever-more-complex game of Xanatos Speed Chess against the wife, her lover, and the cops, as he attempts to bump her off, tie up a proliferating number of loose ends, and keep the police in the dark about it all.
- This was a remake of Dial M for Murder, in which the husband was so good that his hastily-improvised new plot was arguably a better way of getting rid of his wife than the murder.
Daniel Ocean's crew in the Ocean's Eleven series are surprisingly adept at this.
- Naturally, they continue this in Ocean's Thirteen, particularly with The Cartwheel by Basher. They attempt this in Ocean's Twelve as well, but they fail. But it's okay because the whole thing was a Xanatos Gambit in the first place.
Despite his protestation to the contrary, The Joker in The Dark Knight plays a mean game. His Xanatos Gambit (or Xanatos Roulette, Your Mileage May Vary) wasn't about any specific goal, just to prove that the soul of Gotham was irredeemable. First that involved killing Batman (didn't care), then discrediting him (no fun), then exposing him (got bored), and finally, once he realized he didn't actually need to do any of that, getting the Knight In Shining Armour to embrace a Face Heel Turn.
The female protagonists in Bound plan out a complex con that quickly goes off its rails when their victim reacts unexpectedly, forcing them to improvise new strategies on the fly.
Pirates Of The Caribbean is extremely fond of speed chess, as the characters learn quickly that no one in the cast can be trusted. A trickster's plans are often derailed by some Spanner In The Works, forcing them into countless on-the-fly renegotiations.
Do you think he plans it out ahead of time, or just makes it up as he goes along?
- Cutler Beckett, though, is arrogant enough that he thinks he doesn't need to do this, relying solely on his schemes as he orignally concieved them. He's wrong, and the aggregate chess games of Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Calypso, Will, and even to an extent Davy Jones all come around and bite him hard.
If anyone might be considered a Xanatos Speed Chess grand master, it would be James Bond. None of his plans go off without a ton of snags, but he's always able to come out on top in the end, using every means at his disposal and in general having a feel for what his adversaries and allies might end up doing at any given moment.
Basically the point of Millers Crossing. Depending on your interpretation though, it could be a Xanatos Roulette.
Walter Burns in His Girl Friday. He's ALWAYS got a plan. Really, the only thing keeping him from being a (relatively nice) Magnificent Bastard is that he's so easy to see through.
Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum (he gets better at this with each film) has several Xanatos Speed Chess triumphs, one of the more Oh Shnap of which culminating in
If you were in your office we would be having this conversation face-to-face.
Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars is already notorious as a master of the Xanatos Gambit... so much that people now assume every single aspect of the series is his doing, and all went as planned (except dying). They forget that most of The Phantom Menace has him quickly changing his game plan, either because he overestimated the heroes or because X-factors kept popping up. He ends up getting what he wanted, but Word Of God says there were enough setbacks that he had to wait a decade to get the ball rolling on the next big step in his plan, including the loss of an apprentice. That he was able to take one of those X-factors and befriend him early so he could turn him into a replacement apprentice is testament to his speed-chess abilities.
- Except that it's eventually revealed that Palpatine did, in fact, plan every aspect of the events that transpired in The Phantom Menace, including knowing ahead of time that Maul would die.
Jerry Lundegaard finds himself in a game of this, and is not very good at it, but never gives up.

The Kushiel's Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey, though to be fair, Phèdre seems to wind up playing speed chess against Melisande's XanatosGambits.
Grand Admiral Thrawn. Of course. He was tripped up by some unforeseen elements coming together at once, and his initial backup plan in case of death was also thwarted, but damn if he didn't adapt when he could see it.
- Also, his three would-be successors in the two-book series Hand Of Thrawn, who are sometimes frantic in their behind-the-scenes efforts to maintain the illusion that Thrawn has returned. Thrawn's student Pellaeon demonstrates it too.
- There is a set of four short stories, collectively a novella, where Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole collaborated. In very, very short it involved Thrawn going in disguise, reporting a Rebel meeting near the home of a criminal who supported someone that Vader hated but wasn't allowed to interfere with, and calling down the nearest Imperial forces. He ended up working a pair of planetary policemen into that plan, getting them in through a convoluted scheme and letting them arrest the man. We never, ever get to see his thoughts, but at the end he confesses to a trusted subordinate that he hadn't known about the policemen, but when he saw them and determined they were after that criminal, it was too good an opportunity to miss.
- In Outbound Flight, Thrawn's plan is to destroy the Vagaari threat, and he uses all the new species and technology and ships he encounters for the first time over the course of the book to do so. All of them. Humans, a stolen gravity-well generator, Neimodians, droids, the Trade Federation, Darth Sidious, Outbound Flight, Jedi... all of them. Magnificent.
The Lies Of Locke Lamora
Jeeves of PG Wodehouse's Jeeves And Wooster pulled this off once or twice, when his first plans failed.
The modus operandi of Havelock Vetinari in the Discworld books, especially later in the series.
- Moist von Lipwig is also quite adept at this.
Many arguments have been waged among A Song Of Ice And Fire fans about whether resident Magnificent Bastard Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish makes it up as he goes or has it all planned in advance. It can be argued that Littlefinger's equal parts The Chessmaster and The Trickster, with speed chess as his true forte.
In Lois Mc Master Bujold's The Vor Game, the Big Bad makes up about four or five new plans in a single day as Miles tries to counter them and new chances arise. She even uses her old plans as pawns in her new plans. It backfires. In the end, Miles pointed out that if she had stuck to any of them, she would have been better off.
- Miles learns a valuable lesson here, and in subsequent books he is shown to be a great player.
In Shogun Toranaga and Ishido do it through the whole book. Ishido seems to be better at it, as during much of the second half Toranaga mainly just goes through desperate attempts to buy more time and needs the help of several others to figure out how to counter Ishido's latest move. But in the end it's enough...
Victor Cachat.
- The Mesan Alignment (and Albrecht Detweiler in particular) is playing its own game of Xanatos Chess, albeit on a much slower time scale. Just how successful they are remains to be seen.
In Ben Counter's Warhammer 40000 Horus Heresy novel Galaxy In Flames, when Angron attacks the survivors of their treacherous attack, Horus (after being angry with himself for not predicting it) considers including him in the strike and so being rid of a dangerous ally. But he reminds his advisors of how he never lost, because he always managed to turn everything that happened in victory. He could bomb and take Angron out, or he could adapt his plan to use it and make a still more glorious victory. He explains afterward that by fighting their battle brothers, he had ensured their commitment.
Big Bad Ublaz Mad Eyes and Starscream Rasconza play this in Pearls of Lutra.
Trying to get someone else framed for a crime, especially for attempted murder, is probably harder than committing the crime itself, so I think we can forgive the culprit in The Missing Clue, the last of the Usborne Whodunnits series for younger readers, for ultimately failing. But boy could he think on his feet. Being the screenwriter for a popular soap opera, he managed to frame his target not just once but, failing that, made a second fresh attempt within a single day while only touching the weapons once. With the series of arrests this triggers, he's then forced to not just make his third attempt - framing a third person by getting them to murder his target on live TV - but to write up an entirely new script in the same period of time. That's diligence.
The Denarians in The Dresden Files are rather distressingly good at this. However, Harry's getting progressively better and better at it as well, meaning he can still crash their plans despite now being factored into them.
- Debatable. Its been noted that, with the exception of Nicodemus, the Denarians immortality and massive experience lend themselves greatly to their ability to plan but makes them horrible at improvisation.
Arsene Lupin in the second and third canonical Crossovers with Sherlock Holmes read like this. In the second crossover, The Blonde Phantom, Holmes manages to find and capture Lupin's main accomplice the eponymous Blonde Phantom herself, and has a cab waiting outside to take them both to the station while he plans his next move. Three guesses on who is driving the cab. Later Lupin sends Holmes all tied up back to England, hoping to never see him again, then gets ready to clear his hideout of many years, since Holmes knowing about it compromises its safety. Guess which English Detective is waiting for Lupin to show up.
Artemis Fowl: the Time Paradox is essentially a game of Xanatos Speed Chess between Opal Koboi and Artemis, with time travel added in to make it a bit more interesting.
As noted above, Senna Wales of Everworld is an absolute master of this trope. See her entry in Out Gambitted for the most triumphant example.

The Doctor from Doctor Who is a renowned master of the Indy Ploy. However, on those rare occasions where he actually has a semblance of a plan, if things go awry he'll tend to only pause momentarily in shock before dashing off to salvage victory regardless. The Seventh Doctor, who always had a plan, did this more often than not (including at least one long, drawn-out game with an Ancient Evil from the Dawn of Time).
- The Master has his own knack for turning bad situations to his advantage - witness his magnificent comeback from accidentally destroying about a quarter of the universe to holding the rest to ransom in 'Logopolis'.
  - And in the first part of "The End of Time", after his scheme to come Back From The Dead went awry, killing his support network and causing him to Come Back Wrong, and he gets kidnapped by someone who wants his help with fixing some Applied Phlebotinum, he quickly hatches and executes a scheme to take control of said Phlebotinum and use it to take over the world. He succeeds.
  - Unfortunately for him, he gets out-gambitted by Rassilon, Lord President of the Time Lords, who fixes the population of Earth with a wave of his hand. He then proceeds to tell the Master he's outlived his usefulness and, well, the Master decides to take his revenge.
Michael Scofield of Prison Break is good with this. Especially in the fourth season, he has moved from making big Batman Gambits to this trope.
The bad guys on 24 are very good at this. Jack Bauer is better.
- Whereas there have been complaints that Tony's plan in Season 7 involved the use of elements he couldn't predict, in fact he was employing this trope rather than a Xanatos Roulette He had been working patiently to gain the trust of the real Big Bad and it just so happened that Jack screwed up his original plan and simultaneously gave Tony a new opportunity to carry out his revenge against the Big Bad.
The characters from Star Trek are really good at these. Picard may have the slight edge in executing the Xanatos Gambit, in that he generally tried to stick to the plan and obey orders. Kirk on the other hand just made shit up, thus he's more a master of the Indy Ploy.
The form of strategy generally practiced by wannabe Chessmasters in Survivor, to effectively counter the numerous Shocking Swerves the show tends to throw that has been the bane of their predecessors. Some like to pretend that they're really playing Roulette, just to seem more impressive than they really are.
Benjamin Linus of Lost is the posterchild of this trope, adapting and changing to events around him with such ease over the course of the series that one can't help but find the constant Xanatos Roulettes fairly plausible.
- Then season 5 happened...
This is most of what Vic Mackey does in The Shield, especially in the later seasons.
Michael Westen of Burn Notice is a master at this trope, sometimes pulling off two per episode (one for helping his clients, and another for gaining more information on the people who burned him, although the latter ones don't always succeed).
- In one episode Michael faces off against a guy so Genre Savvy that the entire episode consists entirely of Michael coming up with modifications of modifications of his original plans.
  - The beauty being that Michael sets things up such that, even though the guy KNOWS Michael's playing him, he has no choice but to play along.
Jeeves is a master at this, even when Bertie isn't and comes up with plan Bs like "Feign amnesia!"
Colonel Hogan on Hogans Heroes is a master of this and the Indy Ploy, because no plan ever goes quite as planned.
Nate Ford of Leverage prides himself on being a Crazy Prepared Chessmaster. However, his plans ~~usually~~ always go awry and he has to create a new one on the fly, which actually works out spectacularly well. Every single episode.
- Except when things are going as they planned but they're operating on the Unspoken Plan Guarantee, so it appears to viewers that something has gone wrong.
"I have a cunning plan"
Lamp Shaded in Stargate SG 1 in the Season 7 episode "Evolution part 1". When SG-1 and SG-3 set a trap for one of Anubis' Kull warriors, O'Neill orders Reynolds of SG-3 to set up a secondary perimeter. The man jokes with O'Neill about not having "much faith in Plan A" causing O'Neill to respond "Since when has Plan A ever worked?"
- Several instances also occured in Stargate Atlantis. Example: when two hives force the Daedalus to retreat, Sheppard quickly latches onto one of them before they jump to hyperspace; once they come out, Sheppard blows away the hyperdrive of one, delaying them until the Daedalus comes back with the Orion. Another instance is when he was instructed to man an Ancient ship, he tried to hijack it but Larrin foiled his plan; he responded by alerting his teammates with an SOS signal disguised as hyperspace background radiation. I swear, that guy is a chessmaster.
The Thick Of It and Absolute Power contain many examples. Both feature characters working in crisis management PR, which is essentially the profession of Xanatos Speed Chess.
The Xanatos Gambit over the course of Supernatural is definitely speed chess: the first seal was supposed to be broken by John, not Dean, and the entire Ruby ploy is pretty obviously a response to Sam failing to fall in line the way Jake did or Ava would have.
Lionel Luthor, obviously, from Smallville is breathtakingly good at this. To examplify: When Chloe is blessed/cursed with the gift of having anyone answer her questions truthfully, she does of course start asking Lionel questions. He realizes what's going on after the first question and immediately counter-attacks her on her weak spots, thereby distracting a highly intelligent, pretty fearless and incredibly nosy young woman from using her golden chance to get into the secrets of a powerful, rich baddie. She could have asked questions every moment, she was just too stunned to do so.
Mission Impossible is made of this trope. Rarely, if ever, does the IMF's complex plot go completely according to plan. The IMF team simply improvises around whatever does go awry, and eventually achieves its goal anyway.
Heroes: Unlike earlier Big Bads who seemed to have Fate in their corner always dropping events in their favor, Volume 5 Big Bad Samuel Sullivan has a general master plan but is also frequently forced to adjust when unexpected events unfavorable to his scheme pop up.
The Thick Of It: Resident Magnificent Bastard Malcolm Tucker, head press guy for Number 10 Downing Street, specializes in Xanatos Speed Chess and profanity.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy, making playing this trope the mark of decent commander.
- Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington:
“They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid piece of harness. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot; and went on.”
Sun Tzu's Art of War emphasizes the importance of adapting one's battle plans on the fly to adjust to sudden changes in battle.
"Those who win thanks to tactics adapted to different situations can be called Masters of War."

The galaxy of Warhammer 40000 is the chessboard for a four-way free-for-all game of Xanatos Speed Chess between Tzeetch, the Deceiver, the Eldar farseers, and the Emperor, with a few others dabbling on the side. All players involved are very, very good at it.
- It's probably worthwhile to note that, at the same time as all those groups work against each other, Tzeentch is playing an additional 1000 games of Speed Chess against himself, and at least 100 more against each of the other Chaos Gods. When you have literally thousands of Xanatos Roulettes in action all at the same time (and almost all of them are solely because you love doing it), you tend to have to do a bit of multitasking. Good thing he's omniscient and omnipotent
  - And insane. Or, possibly worse, very very sane.
Anybody who has ever played the group strategy game Mafia/Werewolf as a bad guy has had to attempt this. A detailed original plan NEVER goes off without problems.
- Or for that matter if you've ever GM'd a game with smart enough (or Chaotic Stupid) players.
  - This GM firmly believes that, if the GM's not playing Xanatos Speed Chess, he's not doing his job properly. Of course, that opinion may be somewhat influenced by the sorts of people I play with: a dude who plays for anecdotes, who's character's major life goals are to create a Castle-Heterodyne-Esque disaster factory and to test how well the universe's inputs are sanitized, and who's antics are so entertaining, I couldn't really justify *not* having the God of Chaos watch his back to keep them going. Oh yea, and he's probably the sanest person I've played with. Whomever decided "I wish you an interesting life" was a curse, was an idiot.
  - No, you're right. This GM's plans are closer to Indy Ploys than anything else, thanks to her party's habit of never doing what she thinks they're going to do (but always doing something five times more hilarious). A few times they've gone around important encounters entirely, which, given that it's basically a detective campaign, means that I've got to think fast. Well, I asked for a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits, and I got one.
Pretty much all Cheapass Games work this way, with other players (and pure randomness) changing conditions so fast that any strategy has to adapt just as fast. Looney Labs games (Fluxx, Chrononauts) are similar.
Chess, of course.
Any and every CCG or competitive boardgame ever. There's always that one person who whips out with "WTF" strategies that can and will throw the group off gaurd.
The strategy game Hellgame runs on this trope. Not only do each player control three characters, positioned in different places in the turn order (so a player can be both the first and the last to act in a single turn), this turn order can be manipulated by the playing of cards. Random events abound; every turn begins with a random event (which can in turn cause other random events to occur, or put down triggers which cause them to happen later, often several times), and a typical spell causes random events to happen to other players (or yourself). Combat is resolved by die rolls, often modified by spell cards and said random events. A player can seem to be unstoppable, only for a completely harmless-looking opponent to suddenly jump to the end of the turn order to cut of the expected victory and grab it for himself, only for _another_ player to do the same, and then some. A game can last a single turn, or ten; which is in no way an indication of the elapsed time of the game. Successfully wading through this sea of random happenstances and quirky rules, battling the other players (five of them) for supremacy over the turn order is the path to victory.

Makuta's Xanatos Gambit didn't take the rescue of the Matoran of Metru Nui into account, though managed to get past that. When part of his plan called for leaving his body, he didn't expect it to be destroyed by the end, but he still managed to keep his plan going smoothly, taking over Mata Nui's body and the Matoran World within it at the end of 2008's arc.

In Deus Ex, each faction has someone playing this as the rogue piece — the player — changes the board every step of the way. One could say that the villains are most adept at this, but of course they lose in the end and really their situation is more along the lines of planning out a dozen or so Xanatos Gambit style counters to any foreseeable action. The nominal good guys, on the other hand, actually have to make it up as they go.
- The only faction that refuses to play the game are the Omar in the second game. Their strategy is based around waiting for the day they'll replace humanity as the dominant species through natural selection — though by the end this only becomes possible if you kill all the other conspiracies that would supplant or exterminate them.
This is the favored sport of Yggdra Union's Nessiah.
In Command And Conquer 3, Kane's complex Xanatos Roulette is threatened multiple times by the actions of GDI, the Scrin, or HIS OWN FORCES! However, he's still Kane, so he has the player character iron out all the wrinkles in his plan. And by "iron out", I generally mean obliterate.
- And even when things don't work out, he has proven time and again that he is practically immortal, being able to resurface after things like a Ion Cannon strike on the head.
System Shock: SHODAN, artificial intelligence and Magnificent Bastard, always has a backup plan.
- In the first game, this is SHODAN's plan amounts to this (backup plans listed after initial plans):
  - Destroy life on Earth using the space station's mining laser, so she can remake life in her image. The player responds by destroying the laser.
  - Conquer earth by unleashing the (biological) virus she created to transform everyone into her servants. The player responds by jettisoning the part of the station which was incubating the virus.
  - Transmit herself to earth (she is an AI). The player responds by blowing up the station's antennae.
  - Crash the station into Earth, to unleash the virus that way. The player responds by setting the station to self-destruct.
  - Eject the station's bridge, which houses her mainframe. The player responds by gaining access to the bridge and manually purging her from the computers.
- The second game originates from the player's actions in the first game. The incubator that the player jettisons in the first game is discovered and found to be overrun by SHODAN's spawn... and SHODAN herself had a backup on the computers. This probably happened by chance, however, and not through SHODAN's plan. SHODAN acts more as a Manipulative Bastard in the sequel, however, manipulating the player with less of a multitiered plan.
The Metal Gear series is full of overly convoluted plots, but Metal Gear Solid 3 has no less then three characters playing Xanatos Speed Chess at the same time, which is revealed only after their plans have worked out (mostly) perfectly.
- As expected from the series, the entire plot of the game was one big Xanatos Speed Chess. The Boss faked a defection to Volgin to get his trust and steal the Mac Guffin. When Volgin caused an international crisis when he used one of the nuclear bombs "stolen" by the Boss, she had to improvise to prevent a nuclear war and still succeed in her original mission.
- The second player is EVA, who was in fact a spy for the Chinese the entire time. When neither Adam nor the real Eva showed up at the ruins, she just intruduced herself as Eva to Snake, without knowing who had send him and what his mission was. She even manged to play down the fact that she didn't know the reply to Snakes code phrase.
- And the third player is Ocelot, who was in fact Adam. When the fake Eva contacted Snake, he decided to stay hidden and see how things would play out. He also never was a NSA-agent who defected to the Soviets, but worked for the CIA the entire time.
Xemnas in the Kingdom Hearts series is very good at this. There are many points where things do NOT go exactly as planned for him...and yet he always seems to quickly make whatever happens work in his favor. Sora won't comply to aid you? Use his Nobody Roxas instead. Roxas gains a will of his own? Use a Sora clone that can absorb power from Roxas, and if that's sucessful then mass produce them. The clone develops a will of it's own? Make Roxas and it fight each other to the death, and use the one that's left. Roxas dissapears? Then go back to Sora and manipulate him into helping you without knowing it. Sora finds out about this? Kidnap his girlfriend and force him to keep fighting Heartless for you. All of this fails and you're destroyed? Have a way prepared to come Back From The Dead in a fashionable black and white coat and do them in when they're weakened. Truly, Xemnas is a master Xanatos speed chess player.
Kotomine of Fate Stay Night has a pretty good one of these in Heavens Feel. Plan A: start with sending Lancer to figure out who everyone is, where they are and how strong. Crap, after roflstomping True Assassin he got his heart pulled out and eaten. Ok, uh, well we still have Gilgamesh, and he's pissed about the serial killings going on. Damnit, he got eaten too. Fine, we'll set up Sakura, the monster eating everyone to turn into the gate and destroy the world. Uh oh, the Core of the Grail just got hijacked, time to team up with Shirou to recover it. Oops, True Assassin came after him and humans can't kill Servants with the tools he has. Guess we'll destroy Zouken's body, using my fake heart as a decoy and then drive off Assassin. Woops, the Grail doesn't like me and just destroyed my heart. And, breaking the narration, he still makes it to the end of the path and still nearly unleashes a plan that is in fact much worse than the scale of what he was trying in the first two. Plus, Shirou's ideology has been neatly discarded, and Kotomine really hated it.
Though it's hard to tell what he's thinking, Jon Irenicus in Baldur's Gate II seems to do this. His original plan is simply to experiment on Imoen and the player character in his own personal lair. However, this runs into trouble when Shadow Thieves attack him, his prisoners escape and, on top of all of this which he could have handled simply by virtue of his great power, the local wizard authorities get wind of the unsanctioned use of magic and teleport in to arrest him. Killing hundreds of them is not the path of least resistance even for him, so he suddenly decides to go peacefully, but making sure they also arrest Imoen. They are both taken to a wizard asylum, which Irenicus soon takes over, continuing his experiments with Imoen and waiting for the player character to come after him. The player character already has two potential motives for doing this - wanting revenge on Irenicus and to rescue their "little sister" - but a third one is added when Irenicus somehow appears in their dreams and speaks of unlocking their potential as a descendant of a god, speaking as if the player character could gain great power though he really has no interest in giving it to them but rather just stealing it away. Unless that's just the Bhaal in you talking and not Irenicus at all. (This is also, in a way, the game masking its But Thou Must plot element as a Xanatos Gambit of sorts. You have to go after Irenicus and Imoen, but at least you get to pick your motivation out of a fair selection.) The player may make various choices along the way and choose to ally or not with two characters who are actually Irenicus's pawns, but the end result is the same - in a non-contrived way - and they end up just where Irenicus wants them.
- Also Amelissan, the Big Bad in the expansion. She's playing the Five and all the Bhaalspawn against each other to kill destroy all, and when the player character appears literally out of nowhere, rather than letting them mess up her plans she immediately turns them into her principal pawn. Of course, if the PC failed to kill one of the others, she'd just have got rid of the PC and could go on with her other tools as planned before. Of course, this has the unintended side effect of singling out and even training for herself an opponent more powerful than all the others...
Sarah Kerrigan of StarCraft enjoys Xanatos Speed Chess on the rare chance the other races can strike back against her Magnificent Bastard play. In fact, simply having changed her unwilling Transformation Trauma into an opportunity to take revenge on everything in the universe may be the best Speed Chess play in the game.
Sephiran of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, to a lesser extent Lekain of the same game.
- Still not sure if Bastian is utilizing this trope or another one...
- It's somewhat implied that while devious himself, Lekain was mostly just Sephiran's pawn. Sephiran, on the other hand, has been playing chess since before Ashera went to sleep.
Kuja from FinalFantasy IX had no less than two of these. First, it's revealed that his entire plan was revolved around stealing Alexander, the most powerful of all Eidolons (summon monsters). This fails when his boss shows up and blows it to hell. Panicked, his next plan involves using the protagonists to fetch a powerful stone for him and extracting other, lesser summon spirits from a little girl. (Which will kill her, BTW.) This fails when her Moogle guardian goes Trance and proceeds to kick ass. Kuja then changes his plans AGAIN in order to gain his own Trance power. Kuja finally achieves this and proceeds to kill his former boss. It's too bad that he learns that he's going to die soon anyway, prompting the mother of all Villainous Breakdowns.

In Girl Genius, Gil needs to get into the castle and have it be known that he did — so his father knows, and doesn't attack it. His plot to convince the crowd that he's Gilgamesh Wulfenbach convinces them that he's putting on a show. So — he tells them they're right, and by this means lures them to the castle and breaks the truth them only there. (With some unexpected backup from his friends.)
- Additionally, in chapter 6, both Tarvek and Anevka Sturmvoraus seem to be playing Xanatos Speed Chess with each other for control of Sturmhalten and The Other, executing back up plan after back up plan. Tarvek even says in this strip that "None of this was in my original plan, but it's all working out so beautifully!"
Helen Narbon, of Narbonic, is another case where the fanbase—and even the characters in the strip—are never fully certain if Helen is playing Xanatos Speed Chess, Xanatos Roulette, or if she's just luckier than anyone has any right to be. At several points, it seems Helen, herself, is not certain.
Artie: My last thought before blackout is this: That every aspect of my nature—my mind, my sense of ethics, the body in which I currently reside—seems, now, engineered for this moment, for shielding this woman from impact. I have never been able to fathom the disjointed workings of Helen's mind. Did she surmise that someday she would be in danger? Did she create me specifically to save her life? And, if she really can plan this far ahead, why couldn't she just find a way to avoid the whole stupid situation? I always knew I'd die with a headache.
- It doesn't help that some Sunday strips have suggested mad scientists may be able to see the future to a limited degree.
Parson gives the other characters a lecture on playing Xanatos Speed Chess in this page of Erfworld.
- And demonstrates (Sort of?) his prowess... on the OTHER Chess Master, here.
Freefall: Sam Starfall wanted to get Florence into (and safely back out of) the heavily guarded campus of Ecosystems Unlimited, and maybe borrow some things while they're there. This means improvising and readjusting his plans when circumstances ask for it, like stuffing crickets in his pants, releasing them into the fire detection system, and creating a makeshift disguise.
The scene taken from SluggyFreelance to demonstrate speed chess is actually a poor example, being at best an aversion. Bun Bun is not actually manipulating events, he is simply moving dolls on a chessboard to reflect events outside his influence, a fact that enrages him when it's pointed out.

In Associated Space, Fatebane's plan is constantly adjusting, due to the situation changing in almost every system he goes to.
Chessmaster goes insane (well, further insane) when he loses a literal game of this.
- Subverted in Ayla 5, Ayla and the Networks, in the Whateley Universe. The bad guys TRY for this, but since they can't play NEARLY as well as each other, it comes down to 'Crap! When she did that, Plans A-J can't work, and now K-Y are useless...'
  - Meanwhile, Ayla and Thurban are working a Vizzini Gambit/Xanatos Gambit. They'd won the game before a piece was played. Ayla's Laptops is useless, and the blackmail information is false!
- The Chessmaster does this in his massive Halloween attack. He even had a recovery plan that would have been perfect if the best precognitive on the planet hadn't chosen that very second to take over his communications system so he couldn't launch his recovery plan.

On Fairly Odd Parents, Norm the Genie's plans usually work like this: In "Fairy Idol", when he comes second to Cosmo and Wanda, he hits them with a wrecking ball and he gets into first.
Xanatos himself does this in "Eye of the Beholder," as each of his plans to get the Eye of Odin back from Fox go awry.
Shockingly, Fry, from Futurama, pulls this off in fourth season episode "The Why of Fry." After his Scooty Puff, Jr. falls apart, he's trapped in The Infosphere with some gigantic brains that want to destroy the universe. Regardless, he activates a Quantum Interface Bomb, trapping himself and the brains in an alternate dimension. The brains inform him that the Nibblonians, who he was acting on behalf of, were actually responsible for getting him frozen until the year 3000 in the first place, and enable him to return to the past in order to prevent it from ever happening. Thus returning, Fry briefly interrogates Nibbler in Applied Cryogenics, and, after Nibbler explains the situation, Fry agrees to allow his past self to freeze. He begins to disappear, and realizes he's on the verge of creating a time loop. Showing uncharacteristically quick thinking, he then tells Nibbler " Just remember the Scooty Puff, Jr. sucks."

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