Hugs, pretty girls, and smothered mates
When my opponent, PerfectGent, asked this morning about we Australians giving free hugs I didn't have a clue what he was talking about and asked my one-eyed friend Mr Google to help. Well, it seems a “free hugging” started in Sydney a few years ago and is now practised world-wide.
I'm an acknowledged authority on hugging—at least, if the huggee is a pretty girl. (Sorry fellers, maybe some other time.)
Do you know what an A-frame hug is? It's a hug for shy people who stand with their feet well back and their bodies separated all the way up. They lean forward, hold each other's upper arms, and touch only their cheeks. That way nobody gets embarrassed by too much bodily contact.
Surely everybody knows the difference between a hug and a bear hug? A hug is done with your clothes on. A bear hug is not. Or could I have misspelt something?
There's a strict etiquette for hugging which has just one rule—it's considered very bad manners to be the first person to let go.
And the chess equivalent of the hug? Smothered mates, of course. And in chess, as anybody knows, it's better to be the hugger than the huggee.
These games are part of a collection of ten smothered mates on chessgames.com, You can play through them all by clicking this link.
The first diagram is a well known mate with the queen sacrificed on g8 to lock in the king. It doesn't matter that black could have taken the knight on the first move because 2.Qe8 Rf8 3.Qxf8 is still mate.
The second is known as the Mortimer Trap and was perpetrated by Richard Griffith on a mercifully unnamed huggee in 1888 (the year my father emigrated to Australia). It needs a lot of cooperation from the adversary and since the game was only seven moves long I've appended the whole thing.
If those two examples were from the distant past, hugging is still practised by our modern players too. Here's a prime example the Alexander Grischuk perpetrated on no less a player than Ruslan Ponomariev in 2000. Once again, because it's a short, interesting game I've left the whole thing in place.
This Paul Morphy brilliancy can wrap it up. He persuaded his opponent, the unfortunate Mr Schrufer, to move his king from e8 to b8, next to his rook. Then, in a manner that Don Corleone would have approved, he made the other rook “an offer it couldn't refuse”.
