Jim West On Chess: Chess on "Columbo"

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Chess on "Columbo"

On March 4, 1973, an episode titled The Most Dangerous Match aired in the Columbo television series.

It features actor Laurence Harvey in the role of a grandmaster who schemes to murder his opponent on the eve of their chess match because he realizes that he can not defeat him at the board.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov