Fun With Chess

I’ve been having lots of fun lately teaching Lizzy chess. I’ve tried this before a few times over the last couple years, but she was mainly interested in the drama of the game (“Oh no you captured my knight!!!”) and then the captured pieces would make friends and collude to plot their escape, or the king and queen would go off and get married. Girls, go figure). Now she’s at an age where she can think in terms of groups of pieces and sequences of moves, attacking, guarding etc., so things are a lot more interesting. Perhaps most importantly, having a Nintendo has taught her it’s fun to play a game even if you lose again and again, because slowly building skill with the end goal of beating the boss can be rewarding in its own right.

I remember about that age – 7ish – being really into chess and playing mainly against my brother Martin. It seemed like the thing to do once checkers got boring. Our dad started us off but we learned fairly organically, playing game after game until we got pretty good. When we got older we studied it a bit, but I’m no great expert. Also, I haven’t really had anyone in my life in ages who was regular chess partner at me level, so it’s nice to have a chess partner, even a beginner. However all this said, we play fairly loosely, and I often spot her a few pieces, or even a lot of pieces, and give her hints on what might be a good move, let here take back moves and play out “what if” scenarios. Sometimes we’ll switch sides in the middle of a game. So we do get into some rather uncommon board positions from time to time.

One of them came up the other day when I had a king on the run with just a few pawns and a bishop. I moved onto a square that would normally be check, but the pawn that was threatening the square was pinned because if it moved it would mean discovered check for her side. So the question came up, is this a legal move? Is the pawn really threatening the square if it can’t move? Is the pawn considered to leave the starting square *before* arriving the end square, or is it in some sense simultaneous? I’ve never seen this situation before and wondered did I happen upon something extremely clever, or was I just breaking a rule? Since we had no immediate way to decide the question, I just moved somewhere else instead. My guess is it’s probably not a legal move or would have seen it used before.