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Does this imply killing the opponent is a viable strategy in chess?
Pyric victory - technically you won but the resources you have to sacrifice (your imminent loss of freedom while in prison) make it not worth while.
A high ego grandmaster on the decline may decide loss of the remainder of their freedom in life is worth the sacrifice.
Does this imply killing the opponent is a viable strategy in chess?
An inspiringly optimistic spiritual outlook from the PGN standard, so thank you for that.
Technically, over the board one could just wait until their deceased opponent flags to claim a win, but in practice, for every occasion I'm aware of in high level tournament play, the remaining player will adjudicate the game honestly according to their evaluation of the position -- even if that means resigning out of respect for his or her opponent. See Karapanos-Zoler (2009), or Meier-Niyizibi from the 2014 Olympiad [1].
One more thing to note is that playing high level chess is in fact a strenuous activity; one grandmaster playing while wearing a heart monitor recorded burning 560 calories in two hours. [2] Top players like Carlsen or Caruana keep themselves in peak physical condition in addition to their chess preparation.
And although chess players as a demographic may have certain increased predispositions to conditions like Asperger's, schizophrenia, or cardiovascular diseases (likely due to the sedentary nature of the game), I'll relay something one older player once commented to me: that he has never found a documented case of a high level tournament chess player succumbing to Alzheimer's disease.
[0] https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1554879
[1] https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1771703
[2] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, as they can no longer complete the current turn. Traditionally chess is played with time limits, so it makes sense that death causes the current turn, and only the current turn, player to lose.
This is logical, but the situation when the other player dies needs some solution too. Because the living player finishes their turn and then ... what? There isn't even anyone to have a turn anymore. So for the sake of completeness, I would expect the rule to cover all deaths at the table.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For practical purposes this is not correct though. It would be trivial for the person whose turn it is to make _any_ legal move to shift the current turn over to their now-deceased opponent and as such win the game.
Sounds like both players didn't die at the same time then.
You'd think it would be subsumed under "emergency"
Does this imply killing the opponent is a viable strategy in chess?
And to think, I could have won all those matches I lost simply by killing my opponent.
checkmate (n.) mid-14c., in chess, said of a king when it is in check and cannot escape it, from Old French eschec mat (Modern French échec et mat), which (with Spanish jaque y mate, Italian scacco-matto) is from Arabic shah mat "the king died" (see check (n.1)), which according to Barnhart is a misinterpretation of Persian mat "be astonished" as mata "to die," mat "he is dead." Hence Persian shah mat, if it is the u…
Growing up, I thought that's where the expression came from, and had no clue it was from Arabic! Thanks for this.