
From backwards boards to king-flipping, Hollywood can’t get chess right - petercooper
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bad-chess-scenes-movies-tv
======
wtbob
Hollywood can't get _anything_ right: real police don't act like movie police;
real soldiers don't act like movie soldiers; real programmers don't act like
movie programmers; real lovers don't act like movie lovers; real clergymen
don't act like movie clergymen; real businessmen don't act like movie
businessmen — and to the extent that any real people _do_ act like movie
characters, it's due to the influence of movies.

What really worries me is that most of us have far more false experience of
most of the world than we have real experience: how many of us know much about
chess, or police work, or soldiering, or programming (okay, that one HN has
down pretty well, I hope), or love (I _hope_ most of HN has that one down at
least a bit), or church, or business? And yet no doubt all of us have very
strong opinions about these things, due in no small part to … the false movie
experiences we've had.

~~~
kbart
_" real people do act like movie characters, it's due to the influence of
movies."_

Yes, somewhat more bizarre Hollywood influence is that people fall down[0]
when they are shot (even though, bullet doesn't have enough kinetic energy to
force it), just because they saw this happening in movies.

0\. [http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/07/why-do-
people-f...](http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/07/why-do-people-fall-
down-when-shot.html)

~~~
slededit
Here is some WWI footage [1] Look at 0:33. See how they fall down (this may
also be from shrapnel). The simple answer is that balance requires active
input from the brain to be maintained. Without it you won't be up for long.

Your article is only about getting blown back by the impact which is generally
reserved for only the cheesiest of 80s action movies.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL52P2vH3l0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL52P2vH3l0)
WARNING: Not excessively gruesome, but it is war footage

------
pbhjpbhj
OP says noone flips their king to resign, well I do, but I've never played
competitively. Aren't most games in movies casual? If they were all played
with rigourous application of professional rules then that would be
unrealistic too.

I've seen people playing with the board oriented wrongly, not more than a
couple of times admittedly. Is the reason for it being so common in films that
they've flipped the shot a lot of the time?

~~~
petters
Yeah, I play chess sometimes, and I could not care less about how the board is
oriented.

~~~
jvdh
this raises an interesting question: does one side have an advantage with an
incorrectly oriented board? Googling it doesn't really seem to give an answer.

Most results that I found note that it probably does not affect the game that
much. If you're planning to write down moves it may become confusing when
someone with a correctly set up board tries to replay it.

~~~
heinrich5991
No.

If you set up the pieces the same way, you literally just play with different
colors for the fields.

If you mirror your setup of pieces because you want the white queen to go to
the white field, then you just play mirrored chess. Apply this transformation
again to obtain the actual chess game.

------
beeforpork
They cite ornithologists, biologists, archiologists -- and the worst off are
chess players? No, the worst off are hackers who will cringe at almost any
movie today.

Probably our consulting fee is just too high for Hollywood.

~~~
FeteCommuniste
Judging by my wife's comments when we watch shows, lawyers are probably even
worse off for inaccuracies (and this often goes just as well for shows that
are _about_ the justice system). But they also get a lot more screen time.

~~~
tyingq
Interesting. Can you ask her if there's a movie or tv show that gets it mostly
right?

~~~
greggyb
My Cousin Vinny.

My sister and my brother-in-law are both lawyers. They love this movie. Their
professors all love this movie. And from earlier this week:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885659)

------
mnm1
You think chess players have it bad with depictions? 75% (based on my non-
scientific estimate) of actors/directors in Hollywood don't know how to hold a
gun (and somehow hire a complete staff without a single person that does too).
And guns come up way more often than chess. Not to mention many movie/tv sets
have specialized people who obtain the guns and who, I assume, know better.
You'd think they'd at least tell the actors to keep their finger off the
trigger. If Hollywood was real, completely accidental and preventable
shootings would be the #1 cause of death in the world. #2 would probably be
PTSD from hearing fake gun sounds anytime a gun is shown in a scene. Let's
face it. Hollywood simply doesn't try very hard and it shows.

------
tyingq
The one that really bothers me is when they show someone hotwiring a modern
car solely by pulling wires, stripping them, and touching them together. Aside
from the obvious issues with transponder enabled keys, they don't even address
the steering wheel column lock.

And, it's not hard to get it "kind of right". At least have the thief plug in
some kind of "transponder bypass" gadget and mechanically break the steering
lock.

~~~
mattkevan
My first car, a total banger, was once stolen and then abandoned a few streets
away. The thieves broke the ignition and steering lock, which I couldn't
afford to get fixed. So for the next year or so, until the thing finally died,
I had to hotwire it every time to start.

It never stopped being fun, as I would pretend I was in some kind of 'Gone in
60 seconds' situation, even though the car in question was a rusted-through
Metro. And the looks I got from passers-by, especially in car parks, were
priceless.

EDIT: And as they also broke the door lock, I could totally unlock it with a
screwdriver.

~~~
darklajid
Did something similar: I had a (couple, actually..) Citroën 2 CV with a broken
lock. My "No money to fix it" solution was to have the wires somewhat exposed
and use a screwdriver (obviously anything metal would've been ok) to short it
when I had to start the car.

My door lock worked fine, although I noticed that it was so ~crap~ that I
could actually unlock it with the key of other cars of the same type. A couple
field tests confirmed that I could unlock _other_ 2 CVs with my key as well,
on a regular basis.

~~~
ajford
My uncle had an old construction truck that was so jerry-rigged it was
hilarious.

It was a diesel truck, but the glow plug igniter (or heater, whatever you call
it) had gone out, so it was wired to a couple of toggle switches, so you had
to flip one switch, wait like a minute or two, then flip a second switch, wait
some more, then flip them off, then start up. They were in some kind of pull
out tray (probably an old ash tray or the like) from the dash, and the
original preheater would still turn on the light on the dash, but not actually
heat the plugs, so it was a built in theft deterrent, since you couldn't
actually start that way.

Then at some point, someone either ran over his keys or dropped them in a
cement pour (I don't remember anymore), but he had to move the truck for some
reason, so he busted the ignition cylinder, so he used a stubby screw driver
he kept in the cup holder to start it.

The tailgate was kept up by two chunks of rebar slid through holes in the side
of the truck into the tailgate. The bed of the truck was rebuilt out of
recycled lumber and plywood from demolition work. Grill was rebuilt out of
metal mesh that broke off one of his backhoes I think. That truck was a hell
of a sight. Wish I had a picture of it.

------
lacampbell
Why would anyone expect Hollywood to get anything right? From chess to gun
fights to sword fights to relationships to computing to anything.

Hollywood isn't in the business of accurate depictions.

~~~
izacus
Of course when you do accurate depicions, the piece of film can "feel" so much
better. We people can kinda detect things that are "off" and not as we
remember them and that can push you away from suspension of disbelief and thus
enjoyment of the film.

It's easy to fall into the hole of uncanny valley if too much things just
don't add up. Keeping things realistic can also add more non-manufactured
conflict that makes content more interesting - e.g. see for example The
Expanse, where a lot of conflict of the story also lies in the fact that the
writers understood how space physics works.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
An accurate depiction of life has lots of things wrong in it though. It's easy
to fall in to the hole of imagining an accurate depiction is one in which
everything is precise and correct.

~~~
izacus
> It's easy to fall in to the hole of imagining an accurate depiction is one
> in which everything is precise and correct.

Hmm, what do you mean? Isn't that the definition of accuracy?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
To enlarge on the point I often hear people mis-speak, but that never happens
in a film, or someone hiccups, or farts at an inopportune time (rather than
for comedic effect). These things would be repeated in an accurate portrayal
of people but seldom appear in films. Accuracy in entertainment media is over-
rated and can impinge on a story's telling.

------
wingerlang
As an amateur who plays chess once every 5 years -- We tip the king, I didn't
know there is a correct rotation, check mates are definitely out of the blue
and someone could definitely see check mates that us (the players) doesn't.

I am sure we've had illegal positions come up as well, but that one I can
understand.

~~~
dragontamer
I'm 1500 player in Chess.com, and I still miss out on "Checkmate in 2" or
"Checkmate in 3" situations on occassion. That's why I review every single one
of my games with Stockfish / SCID vs PC.

Generally speaking, those Checkmates I miss are Queen or Rook sacrifices, or
"Smothered Mates". There are plenty of checkmates that are obvious 10+ moves
ahead... but if you aren't explicitly looking for a smothered mate, it tends
to be hard to see IMO.

------
animal531
I can live with odd chess layouts, but the one that always gets me is the
Symbol barcode scanner that's mounted as a dash ornament in the new Star Trek
movies.

Every time there's a bridge scene I can't help but look for it and "fondly"
remember my barcode development days.

------
spatulon
When they say the board in The Seventh Seal is "set up totally backwards", do
they just mean that the board needs to be rotated 90°?

~~~
animal531
Well, if you rotate 180° its ok again, so it's either a 90° error or where the
King/Queen are standing on the wrong board colour, sides of each other (e.g.
Queen on right), or not facing their opposite piece (K facing K).

I'm fairly certain when I was a kid that I made all those mistakes when
setting up the board.

------
linker3000
From "The Net" with Sandra Bullock: "75.748.86.91" \- well, it's more
comprehensible than IPV6, I suppose!

~~~
qb45
Does DNS allow numeric domain names? I presume ICANN wouldn't sell us the .91
TLD, but hypothetically it could be an awesome trick to weird out all those
smartasses who think they know everything about IP address validation :)

~~~
tyingq
There are numeric domain names, but no numeric TLDs. You can see all the
current TLDS here: [http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-
domain.txt](http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt)

The only rule I can find is from RFC 1738
([http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt))

 _" The rightmost domain label will never start with a digit, though, which
syntactically distinguishes all domain names from the IP addresses"_

~~~
ithkuil
would 75.748.86.91.mydomaininmysearchlist.com work?

~~~
tyingq
Yes. You can register a numeric domain also, like 123.com or whatever, though
I assume at least all the 1, 2, and 3 digit ones are taken.

