ChrisL64

Perhaps because I am an ancient (unwise) elder, I feel the little thrill of serendipity more often in the chess world than any other community I am knowingly, intentionally part of.

A few days ago I was thinking about the burgeoning chess and chesspunks communities on Bluesky, and Jonathan Tisdall was one of the first on my list, despite not being quite as active there now that he is happily retired.

Less than two hours later, while leafing through The Most Amazing Moves of all Time by John Emms¹. I came across the position shown here. I recognized it—and the astonishing move white found—immediately. What I didn’t remember, probably because I learned about the game before Twitter was a thing, was that the move was the work of none other than gmjtis!

But it doesn’t stop there. The next morning, before I’d had a chance to share the position, the latest Sjakksnakk podcast popped up in my feed and by this point you know who the guest had to be: Jonathan Tisdall.

And one more amusing coincidence: they talk briefly about The Good Knight chess pub, which I’d posted about a few days before.

You can view the complete game (“Tis Not Dull”) on chessgames.com. I’ve also shared the game with some annotations regarding a few discrepancies in accounts of the game.

Strangely, Tisdall’s amazing game doesn’t appear to be in Mega Database! But I did find two other games that reached the same position years later: Jevtic-Prokopisin, 1995 and Sipos-Torma, 2000.