First-move advantage in chess draw given best play prevails. Even if it cannot be proved, this assumption is considered "safe" by Rowson and "logical" by Adorján. Watson agrees that "the proper result of a perfectly played chess game ... is a draw. ... Of course, I can't prove this, but I doubt that you can find a single strong player who would disagree. ... I remember Kasparov, after a last-round draw, explaining to the waiting reporters: 'Well, chess is a draw. World Champion Bobby Fischer thought that "it's almost definite that the game is a draw theoretically". Similarly, British grandmaster Nigel Short wrote that
A Game at Chess If this is true, Middleton and the King's Men were themselves pawns in a geopolitical game of chess. The characters are based on real political figures. The identifications below are suggested by Gary Taylor in "Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works" (OUP, 2007), pp. 1830–1. "A Game at Chess" survives in nine different texts, each of which has its own unique characteristics. Gary Taylor thus calls the play "the most complicated editorial problem in the entire corpus of early modern drama, and one of the most complicated in English literature". The play is unique in that it exists in more 17th-century