KNIGHT'S TOUR PUB CRAWL






This is one of the sillier, but more likely to be accepted by the general public, aspects of City Chess.  It's a simple little matter which takes advantage of one of the quirkier and more esoteric bits of chess lore.  It is, at the heart of the matter, simply an excuse to get right royally inebriated and go marauding across the City (or other region in question).
 

THE KNIGHT'S TOUR

The Knight's Tour is the name for a sequence of moves in which the knight, moving across an empty board, visits each square once without revisiting a square.  According to my trusty Oxford Companion of Chess "there are countless ways of achieving this, and about 8,000,000 ways of performing the more restricted version known as a re-entrant tour, in which the knight, on its 64th move, could arrive back at its starting square.  There are 2,032 ways of making a knight's tour version of a magic square, based on the aquares being numbered in sequence of moves.  The total for each rank and each file is 260, but it is impossible to make each long diagonal add up to 260 as well."
 

38
35
62
25
60
23
10
7
63
26
37
34
11
8
59
22
36
39
28
61
24
57
6
9
27
64
33
40
5
12
21
58
50
29
4
13
48
41
56
19
1
14
49
32
53
20
47
44
30
51
16
3
42
45
18
55
15
2
31
52
17
54
43
46
Truly, I'd be lost without the Oxford Companion, but I digress...  It's easy to see with the aid of the table how the knight's tour works and once one is a dozen or so moves into a Knight's Tour Pub Crawl one would require the table (and a map) to work out where one's going next.
 

THE PUB CRAWL

If you need an explanation of a pub crawl you have no business going on one in the first place.  Obviously the Knight's Tour Pub Crawl is just like regular pub crawl that follows the sequence of a knight's tour.  The only thing one might want to keep in mind is deciding on an appropriate Board through which to crawl.  There's no sense in choosing a region which can't be traversed in one night in complete sobriety, let alone under the influence of a cocktail of all sorts of intoxicants.

I shouldn't really need to add that this isn't my giving carte blanche to anyone anywhere to take whatever they want and then tell the judge it's really my fault (those people who do believe this I refer back to the disclaimer).  Most people ought to know what states their state allows them to enter (if you'll pardon the pun).  Those poor individuals, however, who simply maintain that the Knight's Tour Pub Crawl should only encourage the consuption of alcohol are unduly prejudiced against Islamic City Shatranj players who would require some substance other than alcohol.

For a pub crawl like this it's hard to beat Melbourne's CBD for use as a Board, but even an area as compact as this will inevitably lack Squares with an appropriate pub or restaurant on it.  Thus it may be necessary to plan ahead and take one's own supplies to those Squares which do not contain an appropriate pub, restaurant, club or equivalent watering hole.  Considering just how much drinking (or whatever) a little foray like this would entail, and considering also that one would probably wish to do this in the company of a medium to large group (or at least to begin the adventure as such), the price tag attached to this adventure could easily reach into the thousands of dollars.  Still if something is, as they say, worth doing, it's worth doing properly.
 
 

Copyright © Benjamin D. McGinnes, 1998


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Copyright © Benjamin D. McGinnes, 1998-2004