Some Chess Innacuracies...


I played competitive chess for years as a kid and young adult.

This is a great film, but there are some inaccuracies as to how chess is really played.

First off, the speed chess the at the Lawrence Fishburn character played in the park is just bad chess. If you try those tactics against a player of any skill, you will get murdered. So the scene where the LF character is coaching Josh to play fast and aggressive is pure nonsense.

Secondly, its very odd that there were so many mistakes made in the final showdown game between Josh and Poe. They could have been nervous, but its hard to believe.

Real chess is tedious, so I see why they had to distort it for the sake of entertainment. The Lawrence Fishburn character was a bit too much.

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I agree completely. The fact that both players dropped their queen during a championship match is absurd. Mistakes like that don't happen in high level chess games, but I guess it would be hard for the audience to follow if they showed a truly high level game. So they showed the players making mistakes that were obvious enough for a layman to understand. In a review of Pawn Sacrifice, the reviewer describes the problem of trying to translate the complexity of chess to the movie screen. In that movie they have an onlooker reacting to the player's moves and describing the action so that the viewer can understand what is going on. Bottom line is that it is hard to make chess exciting in a movie. The speed chess scenes were an attempt to liven things up and make it seem more like an action movie.

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the street chess players....are they like the street basketball players? lots of flash and speed but not the real top level skills

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Yes and obviously nobody's watching this for serious chess anything. It's like Rocky I and boxing.. all matches look stupid and fake yet we love the movie for its characters, life lessons and etc.

I agree the ending is above dumb especially when that kid looks surprised by the queen-check haha

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