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chris@70

I've had to Google castle and chess castling to remind myself. Rukh is Persian for chariot and Indian chariots (a form of chess supposedly originated in India) were well fortified like castles. Thus chess rooks do resemble castles or towers. The Germans actually use Turm (tower) for the rook.

I surmise that because the castling move gets the valuable king to safety away from the centre, it's like the monarch being tucked away in his 'castle'. Early in the game this is usually behind a protective 'wall' of pawns in a row.

Thanks again, paul.

Interesting that in German "Rochade" is used for castling, which seems to be more like "Switch" or "Reshuffle" than anything to do with chess pieces.

[Perhaps it could be more widely applicable to Chess960/Fischerandom/ShuffleChess...]

Strong GM puzzle challenge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_87b5asKARw

Explosive device Aussie native kept in castle perhaps (6)

?A?O??

Mentioning this clue from Times 28,497 here because of my thoughts about chess and Scrabble. I came to it with the above letters already in place.
'Aussie native' led me down the wrong track with ABO. This annoyingly is one of the 419 newly banned words in Scrabble (owners Mattel going woke), but I thought the Times may not care. However, the Aussie native turned out to be ROO.
The chess annoyance connects with our recent discussion of 'castle' as a chess piece. The solution depends on 'man' defining 'castle' as such.

Yes, geeker@74, these GMs are amazing with their pattern recognition. Reminds me of the test of chess position recall where GMs outshone amateurs in time needed to reproduce a realistic given position from memory, but were no better than amateurs if the pieces and pawns were randomly scattered.

Guardian 28,981 (Paul)

28 Boris playing intellectual game, heavens above, admitting 'I haven't a clue' (7)

But it appeared (UK time) the day after his birthday! Jan. 31 vs. 30.

geeker@76
Guardian:
Boris playing intellectual game, heavens above, admitting 'I don't have a clue' (7)

I got sidetracked by GODUNOV, what with 'go' being an intellectual game and 'duno' nearly 'I haven't a clue'.

SPASSKY wouldn't be a Times solution - he is still alive.

Are you in the 4NCL? I'll be at Daventry this weekend.

Sorry Paul, missed the post. In US, not @4NCL...

Fantastic Rook maneuver by Wei Yi, ...Rd8-d3-h3-h1!! on a board full of pieces.
See the game Dominguez Perez - Wei Yi, Pro Chess League 2023 (0-1, 25), scroll down at https://www.chess.com/news/view/2023-pcl-week-1-tigers-unicorns

Hi Geeker, hi Paul - I hope yu don't mind but I did a bit of sleuthing and found one of your games at the 4NCL tournament at Daventry - it's interactive so we can replay it:-)

https://www.4ncl.co.uk/replay/2223/otb/div3w.htm

Thanks, Brendan.
Congratulations, Paul! A tactical slugfest, winning with the Alekhine Defense against the principled Four Pawns Attack. I'd have to analyze for a couple of hours in order to say anything semi-intelligent. 🤣