Tintin Forums

Hello,

I wonder if anybody has figured out something about the chess match in Tintin in Tibet page 2, on the base of the side-view of the board and Haddock's thoughts?

I’ve had a look, and I can’t see that there is enough clarity in what is shown to get much out of how the pieces are arranged on the board. It looks as if Haddock’s king (the white as far as can be told) is in a worse situation than his queen, as Tintin has a lot of pieces ranged around it (that’s not a sure-fire certainty in chess, I know, but it doesn’t look good…).
Haddock is not a master chess tactician, from his inner dialogue. He’s maybe dismissed the situation with his king, and may be right to do so, but he’s probably just overlooked it, if the rest of his reasoning is anything to go by.

He’s thinking about a swap of a rook (what he refers to as a “castle”) for a bishop being equal (“an eye for an eye”). Chess pieces have nominal values based on the piece’s strength, for want of a better word (pawns are the least valuable, the queens the most valuable), and a rook is worth more than a bishop (bishops have the same value as a knight).

Therefore you might talk about sacrificing a rook for a bishop. The player with the rook takes the bishop, knowing that his opponent will take the rook, but that in doing so the first player is looking to gain some other advantage - a clear line of attack on the king, for example. It would be rare to use the term the other way round.

You are unlikely to find many players who would think that a bishop-rook swap was an eye for an eye…

The only flaw in your assessment is that it's the other way round; Haddock is going to take Tintin's rook in exchange for his bishop. However, it isn't clear whether he will be taking the rook with the bishop - my reading of it is that he's thinking Tintin will take the bishop with a pawn, thus leaving his rook exposed. It's also not clear with what piece Haddock would take the rook - perhaps with his queen - which he mentions earlier would have to "fight a rearguard action".

But that's just my interpretation!

Ah yes, you've been and used facts against me again...! ;-)

Quite right, the boot was on the other foot, wasn't it?

Anyway, I may also have failed to take into account that the sacrifice about which the Captain was musing, could have been relative to the pieces he had, rather than a comparison of the value of pieces in an exchange: it would be possible to read it as meaning that he was going to give up a piece, and play on with fewer men, rather than work on a strategy which retained pieces.

Might as well scratch most of my previous post...! :-)