My brother and I stumbled onto an interesting scenario a couple days ago. It is definitely worthy of some serious examination. My first thought, as we were playing on Pogo, was that the computer had made a mistake. Given the peculiar positioning it would not be surprising if it had. In my many years playing chess this was the first time it had come to light. The day past and as it was getting late I began to mull it over again while making dinner. It occurred to me the program had been right all along. Under no circumstances can the king be put in check by the player moving it. Even when the checking piece is pinned to the opposing king. Now I had set up this position with as much thought as I could put into it since I was getting into time trouble and had less than a minute remaining. It seemed quite clever tactically and that had been the theme of the game up to that point. So being a scoundrel I quickly moved to set up his queen for an apparent capture. His knight protects his queen in this position and that queen is checking my king in a very unpleasant manner. But his knight is pinned to his king by my misguided rook, leaving his queen unprotected or in this case pseudo-unprotected. Its hard to imagine a gray area of protection and unprotection in chess but we fell into it blindly. The queen could be taken by any other piece on the board, given the opportunity, besides the king. It was not at all clear that this would be the case when I tried to draw him into this position. When we discussed it further we concluded this could be quite the trap for an unsuspecting player. Organising it will be no easy feat.
