Word: chessboards
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...Experts tend to be good at their particular talent, but when something unpredictable happens - something that changes the rules of the game they usually play - they're little better than the rest of us. Chess grand masters can recall almost entire chessboard layouts from their games (approximately 25 pieces, compared with an average of four for novices), but when chessmen are randomly arranged on a board, those grand masters can recall the placement of only about six pieces. Similarly, experienced actors remember script lines much better than novices do, but they are no better at remembering material other than scripts...
...great fan of chess," Pichuzkin told the police as he handed over his diary to the police. Indeed, his neighbors and friends confirm he was good at resolving problems on a chessboard, a talent to boast about of in chess-mad Russia. But he turned into bloodsport what a Nabokov character saw as an existential revelation. In The Defense the novelist wrote of one chess-obsessed character's epiphany: "...he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess. He glanced at the chessboard and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. But the chessmen...
...empty chessboard may inspire some players with visions of stunning checkmates, intricately choreographed ambushes, strategic feints and traps, elegantly winning responses to a competitor's subterfuge. But one chess player saw a different kind of challenge in the board: each square prescribed a murder he had to carry out, and the rival he sought to beat was none other than the most prolific serial killer in modern history...
...trial in Moscow for the murder of 51 people. He will almost certainly insist that he killed more. He may even point to the chess diagram he drew in a notebook, each square marked with a date: 61 were filled in, three short of the entire chessboard. The police say they cannot find evidence for that number of bodies dead at Pichuzkin's hands. Many of the grocery-shelf stocker's presumed victims were among Moscow's homeless, lured into a game of chess in a suburban park with glasses of vodka and mournful tales of Pichuzkin's beloved...
...life under the Third Reich. There was indeed a paddock fire in the winter of 1926 that sent horses fleeing desperately into the icy Red River, where some of them died, frozen, their heads and necks sticking out for months like, Maddin says, "11 knights on a vast white chessboard...