Chess boards rotated by 90 degrees and occurrences in other sports

As an author that (very occasionally) publishes on Lichess, I know the demands of all my dear readers. They rightfully expect nothing less than the highest quality information: carefully nuanced insights that are both instructive and insightful. They desire only the most sophisticated and the most scientifically supported arguments that one can expect to find only on such highly-esteemed chess websites as Lichess: neutral, factually correct and free from bias.

This article, unfortunately, will not live up to those standards.

The issue on my mind: chess boards rotated by 90º

There is a stringent issue that we can no longer ignore and that we have to talk about. It has come to my attention that non-chess players are unaware of the correct positioning of chess boards. We as a chess community have clearly failed in our mission to enlighten the world about the correct configuration of our game. It goes without saying that I’m terribly disappointed in everybody, including myself. This article opts to inform the world about this issue and restore the world to its natural harmony.
Look at the pictures above. A clever mind would notice they are not identical. Can you spot the differences? (Hint: there are 64 of them.)

An experienced player would notice the difference(s) immediately: a classic case of board rotation. The a1 square is supposed to be dark. The queens should start on their own color. The folding line (plastic board usually have those) should be horizontal, definitely not vertical, dividing up your army... And perhaps more subtle: you have a feeling for the bishops. The light-squared one on f1 is your hero swooping through enemy lines, whilst the dark-squared one on c1 is just always letting the team down, usually by getting stuck behind a pawn chain, and you’re just relieved when you can finally trade it off against some random lousy knight. (Depending on preferred opening, this might be the other way around, but surely everybody has their favorite bishop.)

However, for people outside the community these things are not so obvious, which results in this mistake being made surprisingly often in popular culture, like movies and art. (Along with many other mistakes, by the way.) This is particularly ironic, because chess is usually a metaphor for intelligence, a connection that by itself is rather dubious already. I don’t have any great examples, but just google ‘chess mistakes in movies’, and you’ll get plenty of examples.

Occurrences in other sports

Perhaps I’m too harsh on people. Perhaps rotating the board 90º isn’t too big of a deal. Besides that, rotating the playing field happens in other sports as well. Haven’t you noticed? Probably not, but that’s because you probably aren’t an expert in these other sports. I have looked really closely, and these type of mistakes happen in other sports much more frequently than you actually think. Take for example the snooker world championships a while ago, where an experienced referee actually flipped the table setup by 90º by complete accident:
Strange, right? Now that I told you, it’s obvious. You cannot unsee it. But be honest: would you have noticed the mistake without me? I think we both know the answer to this question.

But this is only the tip of the 90º-rotated iceberg. I started to dig deeper, and found the following astonishing game of tennis. Here, the playing field was also flipped by 90º, and the players played a full match without noticing any difference. It’s very unsettling that even the pros, referees and a full station of people didn’t recognize any irregularities.

So, what’s the big deal you ask? Well. With these sports, nothing particular, But there are instances where turning things 90º around could induce some serious harm and injuries. Take darts for example. It’s of underestimated importance to throw the pointy objects towards the board, and not towards the audience. Luckily, professional players would never get confused and starts throwing their lethal arrows the wrong direction... Oh wait... No... No, this cannot be... Tell me it ain’t true...

Well... I guess sports with projectiles are particularly bad when flipped 90º. Like, take for example the biathlon. A little bit of skiing, a little bit of shooting. I never really understood why one should combine these things, I guess tradition or something, but people seem to enjoy it. Now, it is of vital importance the organization gets the shooting-part right. If you rotate the playing field by 90º, things can quickly get very, ehhh, awkward.

But it’s not just projectiles one has to be careful with. Take for example something that occurred at the Olympics a few years ago. It is known that building at sport venues in rapid time is always very stressful and chaotic, so, unsurprisingly, errors are to be expected. A pretty bad 90º mistake was made whilst constructing the competitive diving pools and jump boards. It didn’t get much media coverage (I guess they successfully swept the disaster under the rug), so I don’t know the outcome. But I assume the next competition four years later had a whole lot less contestants.

I guess these things just happen. Nothing to do about it. More often than not, people will get it right. But even with many people around you, you sometimes just turn things around 90º automatically. Just because it looks so similar. Don’t feel too bad for yourself. It really happens to the best of us. Just take a look at the image below. I strongly suspect some of these guys is doing it wrong. Must be his first day at the office, probably. Hang on there buddy, you’re doing a great job anyway. Like, I don’t even know how this is physically possible. Strong local winds I guess. But surely his friends will be helpful and show him the silly errors of his ways. Hopefully, before it’s too late.

Conclusion

I think we can safely conclude that rotating the chess board 90º is kinda clumsy, but the situation gets a lot worse in other sports, so we should consider ourselves lucky. If you, my dear reader, happen to be a movie-producer unaware of chess (pretty unlikely considering this is posted on a chess website, but still...), then please think again: did these images look a little silly? If so, please be aware that rotating the chess board by 90º is equally silly to chess players.

Some people might still have questions, I understand. I only dealt with rotations of chess boards around the y-axis, which already is pretty difficult to grasp for many. I haven’t even started about turning the board 90º around the x-axis, which leads to a whole different array of complications. But that’s a topic for another time. For some reason, movie directors are clever enough not to make that mistake regularly. I don’t know why, but let’s just be happy about that.

I hoped at least some people enjoyed this random piece of text and these poorly photo-shopped stock images. I figured some light-reading during the holiday season would be nice for a change. But I'm slightly scared to hit the 'publish' button, to be honest... Just as a disclaimer, I don’t know anything about the sports displayed, nor do I know any of the people in the images. It’s basically randomly chosen, just to be suitable for the given purposes. I tried to blur out all of the advertisements and sponsor names though, hopefully I didn’t miss any.

What’s left to do is probably to wish everybody that made it all the way through this abomination of an article a super wonderful next year. May all your rating goals be reached. I have two chess goals: (1) finally becoming a superGM; a goals that strangely enough tends to repeat itself every year and (2) becoming equally successful with my team I’m currently building on Lichess. (And please, consider this a shameless form of self-advertising.)