List of chess-related deaths

As with most games that have a long history, chess has been associated with a number of anecdotes, and some relate to games that have resulted in the death of one of the players involved. The reliability of many of these anecdotes is suspect, but some appear to be based on fact.

Bavarian prince

Possibly the anecdote with the most supporting evidence is given in the book Chess or the King's game (1616) by Augustus, Duke of Lüneburg, who claimed to have obtained it from an old Bavarian Chronicle, then in the library of Marcus Welsor but now lost. The anecdote states that Okarius (also spelt Okar or Otkar), the prince of Bavaria, had a son of great promise residing at the Court of King Pippin. One day Pippin's son was playing chess with the young Prince of Bavaria, and became so enraged at repeatedly losing that he hit the prince on the temple with one of his rooks and killed him on the spot. This anecdote is repeated in another Bavarian Chronicle, and in a work by Metellus of Tegernsee about Saint Quirin and other documents refer to his death while at Pippin's court.

Earl Ulf

King Canute (c. 994–1035) of Denmark, England and Norway, is said to have ordered an earl killed after a disagreement about a chess game. By one account, the king made an illegal move that angered Earl Ulf, who knocked over the board and stormed off, after which the king sent someone to kill him.^[1][2]

Murderous origins in Near East

See also: Wheat and chessboard problem

In one likely apocryphal story about the origin of chess, the King of Hind commissioned a peasant or minister to create a strategy game of surpassing quality. Pleased with the result, the king asked the inventor to name his price. The inventor gave the king a choice, his own weight in gold, or, the king could put one grain of rice on the first square of the board, two on the second, 4 on the 3rd, and keep on doubling the number of grains for every one of the 64 squares. The king hastily chose the second option. Somewhere around square 32, he came to a realization that there was not enough rice in the kingdom. Upon realizing that he could not possibly pay the debt, the king chose to kill the inventor.

The first half of the chessboard would have represented some 100 tonnes of rice, while the second half would have required 460 billion tonnes, some six times the mass of all life on Earth.^[3]

"Chessboard killer"

Alexander Pichushkin, a Russian serial killer, once said he wanted to murder 64 people, the same number as squares on a chessboard - leading to the nickname "chessboard killer."

Michael Steward

In October 2009, Iowa City, Iowa resident David Christian killed neighbor Michael Steward after the two got into a fight over a chess match. Christian was sentenced to ten years in prison as part of a plea bargain. ^[4][5]

In fiction

• In Ambrose Bierce's 1909 short story "Moxon's Master", a chess-playing robot murders its creator after losing a game.
• In Agatha Christie's 1927 novel "The Big Four", a chess master is murdered by a strong electrical shock dealt him in the third move of his Ruy Lopez opening. In anticipation of his opening, the electrical connection was rigged to the square on the board through the floor from the apartment below.
• In Kurt Vonnegut's 1953 short story "All the King's Horses", a communist Chinese officer holds a U.S. ambassador, his family, and a number of enlisted men hostage, using them as chess pieces, ordering removed "pieces" to be executed.
• In John Brunner's 1965 science fiction novel The Squares of the City, the murderous events which take place are eventually shown to have the structure of a famous 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin.
• In the 1967 spy film Deadlier Than the Male, the chief hero and villain square off on a giant electronically controlled chess board manned by lethal pieces.
• In Dorothy Dunnett's 1969 novel Pawn in Frankincense, a character is coerced into a life-size chess match with his son's life at stake.
• Katherine Neville's 1988 novel The Eight centers around an ancient chess set over which two opposing factions have battled for centuries, taking the roles of actual chess pieces.
• In the 1992 thriller film Knight Moves, a serial killer commits a series of murders across the city and a chess grandmaster helps catch him.
• In the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, characters become human chess pieces in a life-sized game of Wizard's Chess, risking their lives.

Parody

In 1994, the parody newspaper Weekly World News featured a story about a chess player named "Nikolai Titov" whose head exploded during the Moscow Candidate Masters' Chess Championships due to the (fictional) condition 'Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis'.^[6]

See also

• List of unusual deaths

References

1. ^ Chesstories - King Canute and the Murder of a Danish Earl
2. ^ "The Chess Player" 1852 - Google books
3. ^ Raymond Kurzweil (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines, Viking Adult. ISBN 0-670-88217-8
4. ^ "Iowa City Murder Suspect Makes Initial Court Appearance", KCRG, October 20, 2008, accessed July 7, 2011.
5. ^ "Christian Sentenced in Chess-Game Murder", KCRG, October 13, 2009, accessed July 7, 2011.
6. ^ "Chess Player's Head Explodes". The Urban Legends Reference Pages. http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/chess.asp. Retrieved 2007-04-06.