If You Try to Lose, and End Up Winning; Are You the Victor or the Loser?

Let’s play football.

I got this very interesting question from a Twitter acquaintance. If you try and answer the question, you’ll probably get lost. While most of her posts gets very popular, this was a gem neatly hidden.

Thinking on it, and by Googling, I found a variation of chess that I have never tried playing. The variant is known with quite a few names — the ones I remember are Losers Chess, Losing Chess, Suicide Chess. I love the last name the most.

The rules are the same as regular chess, except the objective of each player is to lose. Each player tries to get their own king killed. I’m sure there are many books on how to win at chess, and probably the probability of you winning would depend on how many of those books you’ve read. I wonder if there’s ever a book written on how to lose at chess.

There could be other games too, where this same variant could make the game more interesting.

Tic-tac-toe for example. What would happen if the variant enters the world of rocks, papers and nail cutters?

The most interesting place this variant could enter should be Football. There could be many variants of this variant. Here’s one of them:

Every five minutes, the referee blow the whistle. All players should stop running at the sound. That could be tough if you’re running fast. So the referee would blow the whistle for 5 seconds. More than enough time to stop wherever each player wants to.

Now, each player finds the player closest to them. And exchange jerseys.

What else could this variant do?