Fun:The Hasbro-IBM chess conspiracy

Have you noticed that it's rather hard to buy a decent chess set in a store these days?

Well, first off, try submitting a chess variant to any game company. People from Hasbro have said that they don't accept them because they don't sell without a profitable license attached. That means when you go buy a chess set, they'll just be cheap, no-name five dollar boards unless you spend the big bucks to order mail-order. The only possible conclusion: Hasbro is at the head of a conspiracy to stamp out chess so everyone will be required to buy Scrabble and Monopoly sets. (Why else would they have a gazillion different versions of Monopoly on the shelves — a game nearly everyone plays but almost no one knows how to actually win?)

Of course, Hasbro isn't in this alone. At some point — no one knows when — they enlisted IBM for help, knowing how computer chess was such a big deal in research, and the two companies began to research chess designs that would absolutely stomp the world's best players, so the game would be "solved" and people would lose interest in the game and wind up buying Hasbro products instead. However, after the first Deep Blue match, IBM realized it couldn't do the job, so that's why they cheated Garry Kasparov out of a win in the rematch. It's also why go, xiangqi, and shogi boards are so hard to find in the US.

Of course, Bobby Fischer knew about this, and the US government's complicity in this, which is why he had to flee to Iceland, where he was murdered by a bunch of Yakuza enforcers hired by IBM Japan. True story.🇱🇮