Chess-related deaths

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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 murder of one of the players involved. The reliability of many of these anecdotes is suspect, but some appear to be based in fact.

1 Bavarian prince
2 Earl Ulf
3 Murderous origins in Near East
4 Fiction
5 Parody
6 See also
7 References

[edit] 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.

[edit] Earl Ulf

King Canute (c. 994–1035) of Denmark, England and Norway, is said by some 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]

[edit] Murderous origins in Near East

In one likely apocryphal story about the origin of chess, the King of Hind, possibly India, commissioned a peasant or minister to create a strategy game of surpassing quality. The king, pleased with the result, was tricked by the price. Upon realizing that he could not possibly pay the debt, the king chose to kill the inventor. See Shahnama theory.

[edit] Fiction

In Ambrose Bierce's short story "Moxon's Master", a chess-playing robot murders its creator after losing a game.
Katherine Neville's debut 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. This has resulted in numerous murders, including that of a has-been chess champion killed in the restroom of a chess club during tournament play.
In Kurt Vonnegut's 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, and ordering removed "pieces" to be executed. The ambassador is forced to use his own men and family to win the chess game, eventually sacrificing his own son to win the match. However, this is prevented when the officer is fatally stabbed by a concubine.

[edit] Parody

In 1994, the parody newpaper 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 ^[1].