Stuff I Did Not Blog Sunday, Part III: To Mess with Chess Novicess

   As I continue to work on writing projects, here's something that has nothing to do with writing. If you're playing chess with someone, preferably a novice, someone who doesn't know the rules that well. Or at least someone who is not an absolute expert on chess, and would assume that you're technically in the right playing these moves. Because the following tricks deal exclusively with messing with the rules. Pawn promotion is weird. Exploit the loopholes. (En passant is actually pretty airtight. Sorry.) Some of these are better ideas than others, but there are uses for all of these.

1. Famous chess teacher George Koltanowski tells the story of a student of his who promoted a pawn into a second king because Koltanowski did not specifically state this to be against the rules. Unless you're playing against an absolute moron who does not understand the most basic rules of promotion (in which case shame on you for being so mean to the mentally feeble,) I do not think that this will work against your opponent.
2. You can also try to promote your pawn to another pawn, though I'm not sure why you'd want to do this. I suppose you could use it to clog up your opponent's home rank? I don't know. There's not much use with this one, or any use at all. Unless messing with your opponent's head is a good use. That would actually probably work. Go try it out.
3. Promote a pawn to a rook along the e-file. Providing that you haven't moved your king, you can now castle vertically with it and the never-before-moved rook.
4. Promote your pawn to a piece of your opponent's color. This is useful for, say, pinning their king. A pawn would be useful here! Bonus points if you tell your opponent that they're not allowed to move forward two spaces on that pawn's initial move because it's not starting out on the second row (though they totally would, since the rules say that the pawn is allowed to move forward two when it has not yet moved, and, judging by the logic of the unmoved rook castling thing...)
5. This one is actually technically legal, but it involves your opponent promoting their pawn, but you totally blowing through it. In 1993, Garry Kasparov promoted his pawn against Anatoli Karpov, but there was no queen to be found. In trouble for time, Kasparov punched his clock to allow Karpov to make his move, even though the piece there at the end rank was still a pawn. Karpov proceeded to make a move that would have put his king in check, had the pawn there been an actual queen. It was Kasparov who was penalized for his illegal move. Although there is precedent for this, then, it'd be unlikely to happen in an untimed match, which is the scenario most likely with a casual game, with someone over whose eyes you can pull wool, like the other examples.

   On the subject of pawn promotion, there's a chess variant out there called upside-down chess, in which your board is upside-down so that your pawns are only one step away from promotion. But that's legal, since it's the exact premise of the variant, so I'm not sure why I bring it up here. Besides the fact that it's pretty neat.