This week is chess puzzles that fool the smartest people
at Stanford.
Look, we're clearly at Stanford.
This episode of Scam School brought you by Go Daddy.
In the year 2657, in the History of Magic Museum,
there's going to be a dark, forgotten, cobweb-covered
corner.
And it'll be dedicated to Scam School, the only show dedicated
to social engineering at the bar and on the street.
I'm your host, Brian Brushwood.
And this week, we are at Stanford University,
where we get some of the smartest people at one
of the smart universities.
And we're going to fool them with some chess scams.
Get ready to be blown away by how dumb you and I are compared
to them.
There's one of them right there.
All right, first of all, thank you guys
so much for joining me.
This is like a dream come true to be
able to swoop in to freaking Stanford campus
and to hang out with the chess club,
and come up with idiotic puzzles that I have no rights to pose
to the smartest people on campus, all right.
So I'm very flattered right at the onset.
But here's what I want to do.
I figured it'd be fun to start things off,
we're going to do a little puzzle here.
Normally I would do this for a free beer,
but since we don't have any beer here,
I'm going to say whoever gets it first will get a copy my book,
Cheats, Cons, Swindles and Tricks, 57 Ways
to Scam a Free Drink.
But you notice I had all of you guys pull out eight pawns.
All right, now normally this should
be done with eight queens, but I figured
we don't have enough queen pieces to go around.
So we're going to pretend all of these pawns are queens.
Who can set up all those pieces, pretending
they're all queens, set up all eight queens such
that no two queens threaten each other, all right?
Ready, set, go.
I love seeing everybody spring into action here,
this is awesome.
Whoa, whoa.
We got a potential?
Hold on.
Oh, in your face, suckers.
What time do we have, John?
Four minutes, 50 seconds, all right.
You got it?
Hold on, let's see.
Let's see.
Check their work, check their work.
Yeah.
They got it.
Holy crap, they got it!
That was great.
What's the final time?
Five minutes, 35 seconds.
We couldn't figure out this one.
Yeah.
No, I am.
That's right, that's right.
And in fact, I'll show you the version I came up-- well,
I say I came up.
I didn't come up with any of this.
The version I learned, and I just
remembered the number, 3162574.
And so the first one, you start up in the corner.
And then you just go three, one, six, 25-- oh yeah, six.
That's six.
Thank you.
74, like that.
But I'm sure there's a number of different solutions for it.
But I'm really impressed.
Obviously, for people as capable as you guys are, even then,
having eight people all simultaneously trying
to solve it, that took a really long time.
That was a good one.
Give these guys a big round of applause.
That was awesome.
All right, so you're going to make yourself a video podcast,
make yourself famous on the internet?
Maybe you want to talk about your opinions
about late 1970s anime, so you registered Gamelancast.
Question.
Are you going to register it as a .org,
pretend you're a community organization?
.net, oh look, I'm an ISP.
No.
You're going to do .tv, because that's what all the cool kids
are doing, especially right here at scamschool.tv.
And guess who we used to register our domain?
That's right.
Go Daddy.
Go Daddy's been a partners since the very beginning.
They have 99.9% uptime, the domains are ridiculously cheap,
and using their sweet Android and iPhone apps,
you can register stuff while you're
sitting around watching TV.
Hell, you're probably do it right now
while you're watching me.
But the important thing is when you
check out, make sure to use those sweet discount codes,
like scam12 at checkout.
That'll get you up to 25% off.
We're talking $10 discount for an order of $40 or more.
That's like a 25% discount.
The best part is not only will you
be getting a sweet, fat discount,
you'll be making us look good.
And you will be keeping Scam School in business.
The business of stealing beer.
Do you guys have different house rules on whether or not
you can promote a pawn to a queen?
Or can you have two queens on the table?
Is that established?
What's the story with that?
Because I've run into some people who have house
rules where you can't have two queens, or something stupid.
That's just dumb.
That's made up stupidity, Brushwood.
All right, well I will say, just to be totally fair here,
that anything goes.
You can promote any piece you want in the game.
That's fine.
Here's the puzzle.
And the puzzle is I want you to imagine we had an epic battle.
Here's the set up, right here, all right?
It's white's turn.
And in fact, I'll spin it around so you can be white.
It's white's turn, and white needs to mate in one move.
What is the one move under the conditions
I've set up where it's possible for white to mate?
I'm thinking of [? crowning, ?] but then you take.
So that doesn't work.
When you take.
So what you're saying is whatever this guy turns into,
the king could take and he's protected.
That's not a mate.
So it has to mate on the move, right?
Yes.
It has to be in one, in one.
So in other words, the black king can have no move.
In a single move, it has to suddenly become checkmate.
And then we've got the queen here.
Which is good, because that puts him in check.
Right, but it doesn't mate, because you've still
got your space.
So when you say got your space, you mean--
You still got this move.
Could move there.
Right.
Good point, good point.
So this is the move that I'm trying to avoid.
Right, you want to not allow.
I have to prevent you from doing this move
and attacking you at the same time.
OK, so you don't like the queen, because even if you
check there or check there, either way the king
can move in.
You can move there.
That's good, that's good.
And then the pawn there, you move there.
And if the pawn promotes, even if it turns into a queen--
The king takes.
Takes, right.
You still have that spot.
Right, gotcha.
What about the rook?
Anything you can do with the rook?
No Brian, that's stupid.
No, I don't see it.
I can't really do anything with the rook that can actually
give you-- I mean, especially the pawn's in the way.
Yeah, the pawn's in the way.
Of course, yeah.
Good point.
I don't see it.
I can do this move, but I'm still in the same spot where--
That's true, you'd be able to move there.
So, if I have to mate you in one,
it seems like from my perspective,
that the only thing I can do it with is with the queen.
If someone else figures it out, are they allowed to chime in?
I'm not going to lie, there's one person in this room
and I posed the puzzle.
He solved it in ten seconds.
Who wants to know the answer to this one?
Three people.
Everyone else leave.
What were the initial conditions that I set up?
I said two things.
Do you remember what they were, Edwin?
Oh, OK.
Well, if you go like that.
No, it's white's turn, it's white's turn.
No, you said it wasn't.
OK, you did.
You're right, I did mention that it was white's turn.
I mentioned that is was white's move.
And I get to make one move.
There goes my one move.
And if white could actually move black's piece,
that would be way convenient, right?
But I said two things.
I said it's white move, white needs to mate in one.
But before that, I cleared up an ambiguity.
I said that there are some house rules where they don't like
you having two queens or whatever.
So I said for the record, you could
promote to any piece in the entire game.
Including a king?
No.
Well no, you can't have two kings.
That would be just silly.
Even is you promote to a Bishop, it can still take it.
What if you promoted--
To a black knight?
Checkmate.
But technically, that's not even-- you can't do that.
But technically-- and that's the key to a great scam,
is you've got to lay it out right in front of them
to where only after the fact-- you're pissed off,
and I'm sorry.
I'll buy you a beer is what I'll do.
That's how you do scam school.
Now, I have no idea if this is true or not,
but the story I heard is that back in the 17th century,
some Russian grandmaster posed this problem,
because until then, there had never been a case where anybody
would ever want to promote to a piece of another color,
and that he posed this puzzle as an answer for why you need
to make it an official rule that you can only
promote within your same color.
I have no idea if that's true or not,
and I'm sure the folks who watch Scam School at home
are going to send me emails saying whether or not
that's the case.
But I hope you guys enjoyed it.
And Edwin.
Thank you.
You were a super awesome sport.
Thank you guys.
Congratulations to Elliot, and all you guys are awesome.
First and foremost, want to give a huge thanks to Kurt Andersen,
friend of the show, for sharing with us
that puzzle we had to promote to the black piece.
That one blew my mind.
And I loved how many chess experts it fooled,
including here at Stanford.
How awesome is that?
Of course, I want to hear about your success stories
and failure stories.
So hit us up at the forums at scamschool.tv,
where you can see all of our episodes
right back to episode one.
If you're doing the Twitter thing,
why don't you follow me at twitter.com'shwood.
I promise it'll be fun and interesting.
We'll have a good time.
Really.
Probably.
Probably not.
If you want to suggest your favorite bar scan,
write me directly at brian@revision3.com.
And don't forget, you're going to want to join us next week,
because we're going to do a special art house
version of Scam School.
It'll all be black and white, it will not be in English,
and you will fall asleep instantly.
It'll be boring.