James J. Walters wrote:
And then we have the chess scenes. If you love MPI and chess, like I do, then this is the apex - Magnum and Higgins in the study playing chess. It all goes downhill from there, unfortunately. Higgins apparently loses to Magnum 4 out of 5 games, because of Magnum's "Castle Blitz" (Uncle Lyle's Castle Blitz to be more precise). The "Castle Blitz" is apparently an almost unstoppable opening trap for White, ending with a Black queenside castle checkmate, seven moves out of the opening! Higgins, who supposedly plays at the "expert" level and has the highest ranking on the islands, plays into a mate in 1 and falls for the same opening trap four times!? There's Higgins, with all of his minor pieces undeveloped, playing a4 and right into a mate in 1!? Huh?
If that's not ludicrous enough, Magnum's checkmate (clearly shown on the screen) is not even close to being a checkmate, based on the setup of the pieces on the board! It's so bad, it's actually funny!
Is it even possible to checkmate by castling 7 moves into the game, as Don Luis did at the tournament? I doubt highly that it is. Some pawns would have to be gone from both players, and the opponent's king would have to be moved into a position that lines up with where the rook ends up after castling, and somehow be in a position that he couldn't move anywhere without still being in check, and having no way to block the check. Seven moves doesn't seem like a long enough time to set something like that up, even if you were playing someone bad enough at the game to randomply and haphazardly move his king around at the beginning of the game, as well as coincidentally clearing out pawns and losing other pieces or otherwise making them unavailable to block the check.
Even if such a thing is possible (which I doubt), it could certainly never be considered a trap, because it would require your opponent to make the most ridiculous, random, and improbable moves imaginable. Traps work by creating available moves for your opponent that seem like good moves on the surface, thus "guiding" them into the trap. There is no way to guide anyone into screwing up their pawn structure, moving their king to line up with a castled rook, and putting all pieces out of position to block such a check; and all in 7 moves no less.
Killer chess set, though.
Nice to look at, miserable to play with IMO. That was a ridiculously cramped board, with unfamiliar looking pieces. I refuse to play on anything but a Staunton set (3.75" to 4" King) on a board with 2.25" squares.
If Higgins was a real person and a serious chess player, I'd expect him to have a Jaques of London (the company that introduced the now standard Staunton design in the first place) ebony and boxwood Staunton set, rather than a novelty set. Maybe something along the lines of
this:
Only $3600 for the 4" king set or $5200 for the 4.4" king set, (lol). Something like that would be fitting for a traditional British fellow of "proper breeding" (as he likes to put it).
