Undermining (chess) Undermining (chess) Undermining (also known as removal of the guard, or removing the defender) is a chess tactic in which a defensive piece is captured, leaving one of the opponent's pieces undefended or under-defended. The opponent has the unpalatable choice of recapturing or saving the undefended piece. A possible response is to sacrifice the piece whose defense was undermined before capturing the piece which just took the defender. Kramnik–Topalov in the seventh round of the 2004 Linares chess tournament reached the diagrammed position with White to play. The black knight on a4 is defended only by the black pawn on
Cheating in chess the piece intended to be played should be touched, and taking more than five minutes to move should simply mean defeat. (As chess clocks are "still" practically unknown even in modern India, it was out of question during the middle of 19th century — the period in which the film is set.) In contrast to the modern methods of cheating by playing moves calculated by machines, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the public were hoaxed by the opposite deception in which machines played moves of hidden humans. The first and most famous of the chess automaton hoaxes was The