This morning I read that in the premiership they will introduce ‘multi-ball’ this season, which is 10 balls placed around the pitch. When the ball goes out of play, they can quickly replace it with another held by a ball boy and speed up the game. Initially I thought they were referring to the pinball version of multi-ball where you get three or sometimes five balls on the table at the same time, which would indeed make football a lot more interesting if they implemented that one.
Then it got me thinking, what can chess take from pinball and implement? We could use ramps and build them into the chessboard. Pinball tables always have ramps on them. We could have bumpers around the side of the board, and put lights on them to make it look more flashy. We can implement the ‘extra ball’. If we lost a pawn three times, we get an extra one at the end of the game. Not extra ball all lit up but extra pawn instead! And chess boards could be fitted with a tilt function, so that if anyone moves the board lights start flashing and everything goes into lock down, making it impossible to play. The great thing is that chess and pinball are almost identical to one another, so there probably are more options available. One last question, should we make all chess boards electronic and in need of highly trained mechanics to fix them if they go wrong down the pub?
McCreadyandChess 
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