Chess Dreams

Today I learned that in 1972 the International Chess Federation was obliged to issue an official ruling that you can’t castle with a newly promoted rook, and the more I think about the implications of that ruling, the funnier it gets.

So, you aren’t allowed to castle if there is anything inbetween your king and rook, or if any point the king travels through is attacked by an enemy piece. It’s also the case that neither your king nor your rook are allowed to have moved at any point in the game if you want to castle. Additionally castling is usually taken to be the king moving two squares and the rook coming to meet them on the other side… The only way that ruling makes sense is if someone promoted their kings pawn and tried to castle with that. I.e. Not trying to castle horizontally but vertically, moving their king directly into the centre. This would almost always be a terrible move and is the culmination of several other terrible moves (promoting to a rook and not a queen (the only reasonable alternative to a queen is a knight), leaving the centre undefended, for some reason wanting to make your king more vulnerable etc.) and yet… If this were a very specific endgame scenario, I can actually see this as working out to be a good move, and the most galaxy brain take I’ve ever heard of… I have to say, I endorse it and the chess federation made a mistake in their ruling.

The FIDE’s true cowardice lies not in ruling out the move, but in ruling it out with a kludge that declines to take a philosophical stance on whether pawn promotion preserves continuity of identity.