From the YouTube description: "Claymation of the chess game Roesch - Willi Schlage (Hamburg, 1910). The position after 13...Bh3, and the ones that follow, were used in Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" for the game between Frank Poole and the HAL-9000 Super Computer." PGN after the jump.
I like the way it starts out simply and then turns into battle chess.
ht Vikram, via Andrew Sullivan
[Event "Hamburg Hauptturnier-B"]
[Site "Hamburg"]
[Date "1910.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Roesch"]
[Black "Schlage, Willi"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "C86"]
[PlyCount "30"]
[EventDate "1910.??.??"]
[EventType "swiss"]
[EventRounds "11"]
[EventCountry "GER"]
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. Qe2 b5 6. Bb3 Be7 7. c3 O-O 8. O-O
d5 9. exd5 Nxd5 10. Nxe5 Nf4 11. Qe4 Nxe5 12. Qxa8 Qd3 13. Bd1 Bh3 14. Qxa6
Bxg2 15. Re1 Qf3 0-1
Awesome.
I can't believe that someone took the time to actually research and use a real chess game. Bravo! Maybe they are film geeks who love Stanley Kubrick and that inspired them?
Very clever.
Speaking of the details, we watched the excellent movie "Dirty Pretty Things" the other day. Several minor chess scenes, both with the board turned 90 degrees wrong and the K & Q wrong, of course. But they did have a cute line later between the players:
"You know, Okwe, good at chess usually means bad at life. You do realize that she's in love with you, don't you? I've been with her 20 minutes, and I know it. But then, I'm bad at chess..."
Hilarious!
I'm not completely sure, but i think Kubrick was a keen chess player, so it may have been himself who chose the game. By the way there was a nice article about chess and the movies in NiC 2004/3
One could forgive the movies, but I've lost count of the nunber of CHESS BOOKS I've seen over the years with incorrect diagrams etc on the cover!!
Board set up wrong on the cover of a CHESS BOOK, chesshire??? Please, say it ain't so...
I do recall my vintage copy of Speelman's Endgame Preparation gives his first name on the cover as "John," then on first inside page spells it correctly as "Jon" (he's a Jonathan). It was a top publisher, Batsford I think. Misspelling the author's name on the front cover?...that's probably even worse than getting the board wrong. At least you assume editors are paid to spell things right, whereas publishers (and photographers who set up those board photo shoots) aren't necessarily chess players even if they work for a firm that puts out chess books.
State of the art work on chess in the movies is probably the 5- or 6-part series that ran in Chess Life about 10 years ago.
The knight seems to be a cross between a pegasus and a unicorn.
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1254321 has more on the game.
I think Bill Hook mentions Kubrick as a regular on the NY chess scene in the fifties.
Alez is correct, Kubrik was a strong chess player. I heard an estimate of an 1800 rating somewhere.
By the way, in Space Odyssey 2001, the chess scene...HAL incorrectly declares a mate in so many moves, which the human takes for granted and promptly resigns. The computer was wrong on the move count. Since Kubrik would definitely be smart enough to recognize the error, an interesting question arises: Is the computer malfunctioning, or has HAL already begun to test the humans?