Talk:Fool's mate

one such fool ...

 * One such fool's mate was between Mayfield vs Trinks in 1959 and lasted only three moves: 1.e4 g5 2.Nc3 f5 3.Qh5#. 

Mike Fox and Richard James in The Even More Complete Chess Addict (Faber and Faber, 1993) make mention (page 177) of a game with the same moves played in the 1959 US Open, but they claim the players were called Masefield and Trinka. Anybody know for sure, or are we going to have to say "some sources say this, others say that" in the article? --Camembert


 * Got it off chessgames.com, the reference might help, so here's the link: Dysprosia 03:34, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks - I've changed the article to say "some say this, some say that" for the time being. Hopefully one day we'll find something by some pedantic chess historian that explains this inconsistency - it is, I'm sure you'll agree, a most important matter a chess historian will enlighten us on this. --Camembert


 * A couple of years later, it's Edward Winter to the rescue. I've put in a reference to some numbers of Chess Notes where he deals with this (there may be more in the future). I think it's worth dealing with in the article, because even if the game is of doubtful authenticity, it is quite widely given as a genuine short game in various books and so on. --Camembert 22:17, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Here's a diagram of the above. - Zepheus &lt;ツィフィアス&gt; 19:59, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Took me a while looking at the diagram on the article page to realize that it was white who was in the mated position. Should be clarified. --RealGrouchy 20:08, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Where to put this animated GIF I made? I want to include it but it looks to crowd the article.
(Tombrownofbaltimore)
 * Could this be done/redone with the wiki board colours? ChessCreator (talk) 15:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Variation
There's a shorter variation of that. It was between Lance Darling and Richard Wood in 1983. It's right behind this link.Alexius08 (talk) 06:25, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Chess Importance
Changed importance to high from top, while this would be useful for any encyclopedia it's not essential and this is reflected in it's low linkage for a previously top rated article. ChessCreator (talk) 19:56, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree that this mate is more anecdotic than important, I have changed its assessment as Mid-importance. SyG (talk) 15:19, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Moving it back to High, while Top was to much, Mid seems to low with High about right as it has lots of appeal to novice players. It's also the type of thing you would find in an encyclopedia. SunCreator (talk) 15:37, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Different sort of mate.
I heard the following chess problem:

White moves, black moves reflexively. Mate in four moves.

What I mean by black moves reflexively is that black makes the same moves white does on reflexion. So if white plays e4 then black plays e5. If white plays Nf3 then black plays Nf6, etc.

Does anyone know how a mate would develop under that rule and if so, if it would be a fool's mate? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.79.158.214 (talk) 19:26, 25 February 2008 (UTC)


 * The solutions that I know end with Qxc8# There are several ways for the queen to get there: 1. d4 d5 2. Qd3 Qd6 3. Qf5 Qf4 4. Qxc8#, for example.


 * I don't believe it would be possible to solve this problem with a form of Fool's Mate, because (among other reasons) White must move his e pawn to allow the queen to come to h5, but when Black moves his e pawn, it will give the king a flight square on e7. --Camembert (talk) 01:36, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

A third variation
This one actually doesn't involve that much pawn moving, but here it is anyway:

1. e4 e5 2. Qh5 Ke7 (This is the fool's move, here.) 3. Qxe5++ (I don't use # for mate, I'm used to ++...)

Is it worthy for inclusion? ZtObOr 04:22, 5 November 2009 (UTC)


 * No, that is not fool's mate. Bubba73 (the argument clinic), 04:29, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

2021 reworking of article's central section
I've recently re-worked the article's first (and defining) section with what I believe is a good historical exemplar. To that end I've altered a board diagram to have the mating party's pawn move out only the one square, as in the example and contrary to modern instinct. For consistency I've also deleted the .gif for the same reason, and for the moment, though I encourage an interested editor to make up another .gif following the Beale example. This central area of the article previously lacked citation and was mere "lore", but I hope my edits have been improvements. MinnesotanUser (talk) 07:31, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Scholar's mate which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 15:20, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Math
This edit just seems silly to me. I don't have access to the cited book; however, if $$2 \times 2 \times 2 = 8$$ wasn't the particular math they used to derive the number 8, it seems like they'd have to manually check all the variations themselves. I don't know why they'd put themselves through the unnecessary tedium of listing out all the variations and ensuring they didn't miss any. Of course, there's also the possibility that they omitted their methods altogether, despite the fact that it was relevant, informative, and easy to include. It seems especially strange if they simultaneously did include information about the various choices each player could make at each stage, without the authors concluding that line of thought, unless that was also original research.

Speaking of which, what do you mean, the information is "irrelevant"? It is literally the exact reasoning for the previously provided information. There was no explanation for the number 8 that was previously present in the text; from the reader's perspective, it just looks like it popped up out of nowhere. This is the worst kind of thing that can happen in any math-related pedagogy. What, are we leaving the derivation of the number 8 as an exercise for the reader? Some people are just mathematically deficient, which doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to get the most out of Wikipedia. I know it's unwise to always fully explain every number that pops up along the way if the explanations get too needlessly convoluted, but would it really have been too much trouble to take a single sentence to explain that the number 8 didn't materialize from thin air? ISaveNewspapers (talk) 00:08, 29 June 2024 (UTC)