There's been a murder!
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on Tue, 05/05/2009 at 6:22pm.
Last week I was blundering through a game in my usual inimitable style when I overlooked a pawn fork and the loss of a knight. Normally, I'd have said, “Oops!” or something equally intelligent but on this occasion I said, “There's been a murder.” And why? Because my opponent, DaoudLS, hails from Scotland, the home of one of television's most loved detectives, Jim Taggart.
Played by Mark McManus (who died while filming an episode of Series 7) Taggart achieved a cult following for his famous phrase, delivered in a broad Glaswegian accent (it's something like English), “There's been a murder.”
A lot of pieces get murdered when I play chess and far too many of them are on my side of the board. But I'm not alone. I thought I'd bring a few blunders together so that we who are at the bottom of the ladder can enjoy the errors made by some of our more illustrious counterparts.
When we play on the Internet all our games, the worst as well as the best, remain for posterity—but how would you like to be remembered for Marco's blunder in the following game.
Faced with the loss of the pinned bishop on d4 Black resigned without realising he had a forced win. What he should have played was 36...Bg1 with the double threat of Mate, or RxQ.
One of my personal favourites was a game from the Pacific Zonal played in New Zealand a few years ago when FM Bruce Watson murdered a won position against IM Igor Bjelobrk. Watson, who had been playing very quickly, resigned in the following position and overlooked the rather spectacular, 1...Qxg2, 2.Bxg2 Re1+ Bf1, 3.Rxf1#.
But the greatest blunder of all time has to go to the credit of Arthur Bisguier, a man described in Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games as “the one grandmaster who consistently obtains decent positions against Fischer, only to throw them away.” In the US Open of 1962 Bisguier noticed that Fischer had dozed off. With the clock running he must have been in two minds about what to do but, always a gentleman, he did what he described as the greatest mistake of his chess career: he woke Bobby Fischer.
The following video has nothing to do with chess. It's an ad for Tennent's Beer (Scotland's answer to Budweiser). Sorry, there are no sub-titles 
but if you read this far you'll probably enjoy it.
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