Chess Curiosities
Chess's strangest and best moments
Description
Somewhere in Amsterdam, over decades, a Dutch novelist and cyclist named Tim Krabbé kept a folder. Into it went the oddities: a game that ended in checkmate on the fourth move by a player who meant it, a position so improbable it looked like a printing error, an endgame study where the winning move was to promote a pawn into a piece that couldn't possibly help. He was not collecting brilliancies in the usual sense, the way a coach clips great attacks to teach from. He was collecting the moments where chess did something no one had planned, where the rules, followed to the letter, produced a result that felt like a joke the game was telling on itself.
That folder became "Chess Curiosities," a book that treats the game not as a discipline to be mastered but as a vast, centuries-deep archive of weirdness waiting to be catalogued. Krabbé is a strong player, strong enough to have competed seriously, but the book is not written from the coach's chair. It is written by someone who finds the game funniest and most beautiful at its edges — the record for the most queens on a board at once, the shortest decisive game ever recorded in a real tournament, the study composers who spend years engineering a single impossible-looking save.
What holds the collection together is a particular temperament: the pleasure of the person who reads to the bottom of the footnote, who wants the exact date and the exact players' names, who would rather show us one genuinely strange position than a hundred sound ones. The oddities are not filler. They are the point. And they raise a question about the game that instruction never quite touches.
The question we’re asking : Why would a serious player spend decades collecting chess's mistakes, freaks and dead ends instead of its masterpieces?What we’ll see : A tour through the game's strangest corners, guided by the man who catalogued them, and what that catalogue says about the pleasure of a rule-bound game.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The man who kept the receipts
Tim Krabbé is not primarily a chess figure. He is a Dutch writer, best known outside chess for the novel that became the film "The Vanishing," and a keen amateur cyclist who wrote a small classic about the sport. But he played chess seriously for years, reached a respectable competitive level, and never lost the collector's itch. Long before he assembled the book, he was the kind of player who noticed when a game did something the textbooks didn't cover, and who wrote it down with the date, the tournament, and the names attached.
That instinct matters, because a chess curiosity is worthless without provenance. Anyone can invent a bizarre position on an empty board. What Krabbé insists on is that the strange thing actually happened, or was actually composed by a named person for a reason. The book is full of "in a game between so-and-so, played at such a place, in such a year" — the receipts. He treats a documented oddity the way a naturalist treats a specimen: it counts because it was found in the wild, not manufactured to impress.
02Chapter 2 — Positions that shouldn't be legal
The heart of the collection is the freak position — an arrangement of pieces that is entirely legal, reachable through moves that break no rule, and yet looks like it cannot possibly have arisen. Krabbé delights in these because they expose how little our intuition about chess corresponds to what the rules actually permit. We assume a normal game produces normal-looking boards. It doesn't have to.
Take the matter of promotion. A pawn that reaches the far rank becomes any piece its owner chooses, almost always a queen. But nothing in the rules limits how many queens a side may have. So the composers and the occasional real game push this to the edge: boards bristling with queens that theory says should not coexist. Krabbé tracks the record for the greatest number of a single piece on the board at once, and the near-comic lengths to which a player or composer must go to engineer it. The positions are grotesque and oddly beautiful, like a garden overgrown according to strict botanical law.
03Chapter 3 — The longest, the shortest, the impossible
Records are the collector's natural quarry, and Krabbé gathers chess's extremes with obvious relish. There is the shortest possible decisive sequence — Fool's Mate, checkmate in two moves — and the strange fact that it occasionally appears in real events, when a player collapses in a way that theory says should be impossible against any competent opponent. There are the games decided on move four or five in serious play, which Krabbé documents not to mock the loser but to marvel that the game's most elementary trap still occasionally springs shut on masters.
At the other end sit the marathons: games that ran past a hundred moves, past two hundred, into the reaches where a change in the rules about how long a game may continue actually had to be written and rewritten over the years. For most of chess history the fifty-move rule — no capture, no pawn move, and either side may claim a draw — governed the endgame. But computer analysis found positions that provably required more than fifty moves to win, forcing the game's authorities into awkward exceptions before they eventually retreated. Krabbé recounts this with the amusement of someone watching a bureaucracy discover that reality has ignored its paperwork.
04Chapter 4 — A game that only pretends to be about winning
Step back from the individual oddities and a larger pattern emerges from Krabbé's collection. Chess is a closed system: a fixed board, fixed pieces, a small set of rules that fit on a card. From that austerity, one might expect a game that is merely difficult. What the curiosities reveal instead is that a tightly ruled system generates its own inexhaustible strangeness — that the more rigidly the boundaries are drawn, the more room there is at the edges for results no designer intended.
This is why Krabbé's project is not trivial in the dismissive sense, even though it traffics in trivia. Every freak position, every underpromotion that shouldn't win but does, every rule that had to be amended because reality outran it, is a small proof that the game exceeds its own instructions. The curiosities are not exceptions to chess; they are chess showing what it is actually capable of when nobody is trying to play well. The rules do not describe the game's limits. They describe the frame inside which a bottomless weirdness is free to unfold.
05Conclusion
The folder in Amsterdam kept growing because the game kept producing more. Krabbé's collection has no natural end — every new tournament, every new composer, every reader with a stranger example adds to it. What began as one player noticing that chess occasionally did something absurd became a portrait of the game as an engine of the improbable, running quietly beneath every ordinary match. The two-move mate, the board crowded with queens, the pawn that wins by becoming a knight: these are not the game malfunctioning. They are the game at full stretch.
