In the game of chess, perpetual check is a situation in which one player can force a draw by an unending series of checks. Such a situation typically arises when the player who is checking cannot deliver checkmate; while failing to continue the series of checks gives the opponent at least a chance to win. A draw by perpetual check is no longer one of the rules of chess. However, such a situation will eventually result in a draw by either threefold repetition or the fifty-move rule, but usually players agree to a draw (Burgess 2000:478).
Perpetual check can also occur in other chess variants, although the rules relating to it may be different. For example, giving perpetual check is not allowed (an automatic loss for the giver) in both shogi and xiangqi.
Famous quotes containing the words perpetual and/or check:
“What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
Not, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labor as a wise man’s art.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)