Over at the LCU Blog, there’s a discussion of illegal moves in games (scroll down in the comments for an example from Peter Cafolla). This calls to mind an Irish world record, at least according to Tim Krabbé’s Chess Records site: most castlings in a single game, held by the game Heidenfeld-Kerins, Dublin 1973.
White, having earlier played 10. 0-0, now castled queen-side. Since he’s a full rook down and the game goes on for quite a while, we must assume that Black at least was in severe time trouble, and the moves must have been blitzed out at a rate that makes this oversight understandable.
[Click to replay the full game.]
Do you find this an impressive world record? Me neither. It’s hard to believe this doesn’t happen all the time. John Delaney reports another case in his game against Gerard O’Connell in the Armstrong Cup 2009-10:
(Bizarrely that post seems to have been airbrushed from the LCU Blog archives–I don’t know why.)
For a truly impressive record we’d have to have four or more castlings in the same game. (Any suggestions?) And for genuine surprise we’d have to have something more bizarre, such as the story I read of many years ago (reference long gone, sorry) of the fellow who was playing in some large congress in England where the boards were closely packed together. He sacrificed his queen’s rook, then later in a tense conclusion saw that he only needed to play … 0-0-0 to win. Entirely carried away, he castles, inadvertently grabbing the black king’s rook from the next board, and duly carried away the point.