White can actually lose on move 2 if he plays fool's mate 1. f4 e6 2. g4 Qh4#. But he can only win on move 3 with 1. e4 f5 2. f4 (or pretty much anything except Ke2, which would transpose into the
bongcloud) g5 3. Qh5#. Scholar's mate is 1. e4 e5 2. Qh5 (or Qf3) Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. Qxf7#.
Fischer random chess is slightly different, because all the pieces (except the rooks and the king - so just the knights, bishops and queen, both bishops on opposite colours, and black's pieces the same as white's) are arranged randomly, and then the rooks and king are put on the remaining squares, with the king in the middle. It's also called chess960, because there are 960 different starting positions - so normal chess is just a special case of random chess.
I guess sort of another variant is blindfold chess, where the players don't see the board but just call out moves. And
suicide chess where you have to get rid of all your pieces, and if you can capture something then you're forced to. I thought that checkmate still won, but apparently in most variants it doesn't. I really can't see Ben taking advantage of that ambiguity at all.
Mr Thorsby wrote:
Concerning the trick of playing against two grand masters at once, and making them play each other. I saw something on TV (perhaps a miniseries?) where this was a plot point. The protagonist was a rascally young woman. She was on a cruise ship. And there were two men on the ship that was very good at chess. And the woman made a bet that she could beat one of them (or both?) even though she wasn’t any good at chess.
Derren Brown did this in one of his TV series, except he played 9 people, so he actually had to beat the 9th one. And then he revealed that he had written down the number of pieces that would be left on the boards, which is a little tricky on the games that you're not even playing. I'd already read about it in some other book, so wasn't very surprised.
_________________
The former tennant was anti-corporal-punish
Meant well, but it came to nothing.
...
He is genius in allocation of space