Call Him Euthydemus: Naming the Scholar’s Mate Trickster

“Imitate […] Socrates.”
—Benjamin Franklin, inventor, statesman, diplomat, moralist, chess player

He Would Have Loved Chess

My father-in-law is an avid puzzle guy, meticulous carpenter, impeccable gift wrapper, and lover of quiet, reflective activities. He has the makings of a fine chess player.

Yet, in his teens, my father-in-law walked into his high school’s chess club and sat down to play. It was all over in four moves. He never went back.

I fell for those four moves in school, too. While I was still smarting, the kid added a flourish of misinformation: “That’s called the Blitzkrieg,” shared with an air of mastery. Only later did I realize this misinformation was an important clue: it wasn’t mastery he was after, just tricks.

My father-in-law shared his story with me when my son started playing. His interest in the game has rekindled. I wished he had known all those years ago that he had fallen victim to a common, often cruel rite of passage: the Scholar’s Mate. I showed it to him and shared my own experience.*

Generation after chess-playing generation, many a chess player has known Euthydemus.

Why We Need a Name for the Scholar’s Mate Trickster

Giving That Kid—the one who uses Scholar’s Mate to humiliate beginners—a name does more than label him. It does two important things: (1) it gives us a shared character, putting all of us in the same story, and (2) it does some meaningful ethical work.

You might ask why we haven’t just called him “the Scholar.” That looks like it might work, but there’s a problem. “Scholar” is ambiguous: does it refer to the schoolkid who plays the trick, or the schoolkid who falls for it? By analogy with “Fool’s Mate,” it would seem the Scholar is the one who falls for it. Either way, “scholar” won’t do.

Here’s where “Euthydemus”—a name rich in meaning, history, and delicious irony—comes into play, making a lovely connection between ethics and chess.

Euthydemus: Timeless Type

To appreciate why, let’s turn to Plato. Euthydemus (pronounced you-THID-uh-muss) is a character in a Platonic dialogue of the same name. Written as philosophical sitcoms, Plato’s dialogues give us some comical Athenians or hot-shot visitors, whom the ever more penetrating, ironic Socrates invariably exposes as pompous windbags.†

In the Euthydemus, the title character calls on one of Athens’s promising youth, Clinias, to engage in a public display of eristic argument. New to this kind of thing, Clinias falls—very quickly—into several verbal traps, finding himself making self-contradictory statements and, in another instance, committing himself to absurd opinions no one holds. Clinias becomes a laughingstock for Euthydemus and his pals, and perhaps to a few onlookers and passers-by.

Euthydemus, who advertises himself as a teacher of “excellence” (arete), a cultural ideal that carries the idea of “living at your greatest potential,” seems to succeed only when he’s allowed to keep the questions he frames to narrow confines. The questions must be answered in sequence. He forbids qualifying questions, attempts at definition, and revision—all of which normal conversation requires. Euthydemus’s arete, at least at argument, is of a narrow kind.

Socrates, by contrast, is quite comfortable in an open conversation. No artificial conditions, no ambiguities, no fallacies required. His conversation with Clinias allows room for exploration, discovery, collaboration. Socrates’s famous “method” has two goals: (1) to model a logically and ethically legitimate means of arriving at knowledge, and (2) to determine, if possible, the correct definition of his society’s weightiest ethical concepts.

With each mention of Euthydemus’s name, Plato plays an ironic note: Euthydemus means, literally, “good for the demos” (i.e., “Public Good”). In Plato’s treatment, however, Euthydemus is out for no one’s good but his own. Euthydemus’s name serves Plato’s rhetorical goals: as Aristotle notes in his Rhetoric, meanings of proper names can serve persuasive ends because, after all, names are supposed to mean something (2.23, where Aristotle notes Plato's use of this technique).

Mr. “Public Good” has no idea how to promote it.

Scholar's Mate: Chess Fallacy

Fallacies, or various ways of proceeding on unsound assumptions, say something about a communicator’s “ethical disposition” (see Duffy). While the language of classical ethics does not rise to the status of household words these days, many educators, at all levels, are certainly aware that the possession of certain “social-emotional skills,” or facility with recognizing, knowing the causes of, and managing the emotions of oneself and others is entirely relevant to academic outcomes, including cognitive functioning and creating emotional safety for others. (And, when learning chess, emotional safety is just as important as King safety.)

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a wonderful and certainly long-overdue insight. According to this source, however, social-emotional learning is not always easy to implement. English teachers and the rhetorically trained, however, may be able to help somewhat: the presence of fallacies, especially to a pronounced degree, is cause for rhetorical instruction along ethical, as well as psychological, lines. Classical rhetoric, as Aristotle understood it after all, lies at the intersection of logic, ethics, and psychology (all items in parentheses though not brackets immediately below are my additions for clarity):

... it is manifest that grasping the modes of persuasion belongs to someone capable of (1) forming syllogisms (logic, which Aristotle elsewhere allows to govern probabilistic arguments as well as deductively certain ones; (2) and of reflecting what concerns characters and the virtues (ethics); (3) and, third, [of reflecting on] the passions (emotions, the purview of psychology)—both what each of the passions is and what sort of thing it is, and from what the passions come to be present and how they do so. (Aristotle 1356a)

Clearly, Aristotle knew that rhetoric, as mass communication designed to support the healthy function of the political system, had to bring on board a psychology to account for emotions (which Aristotle knew to be a decisive factor in message transmission and reception), and the habitual approach (ethos literally means habit or custom) citizens take to their daily lives and interactions with others. Such—in the most general terms—is the real, consequential, and ever-present human context in which messages are crafted, sent, received, and acted, or not acted, upon.

“Ethical disposition,” then, following Duffy—who is deeply in touch with this civic/ethical orientation to rhetoric—is precisely what Plato wishes to underscore in his title character. Euthydemus is not out for a conversation with equal minds in a shared investigation. Under a narrow set of constraints that he enforces, Euthydemus drags Clinias through ambiguities and equivocations, leaving no time for reflection. Clinias, short on experience, falls for the traps.

Scholar’s Mate is a chess fallacy. While perfectly legal, it violates an important opening principle: don’t bring your Queen out too early, thereby forfeiting central control and piece development. Experienced players can easily refute it. Chess's “Euthydemus,” in playing 3. ... Qh5 or 3. ... Qf3, is making use of an inferior choice to get a quick win. Yet because the beginner is a beginner, nothing seems amiss. Then, “Checkmate!” The game is over. Not much of one, either. It is eristic chess.

Important to Euthydemus’s character is that he knows better than how he performs: he knows ambiguity and equivocation do not license reasonable inferences. He may even know that bringing the Queen out too early risks losing her and falling behind in development. In both cases, however, he goes with the inferior move. His approach is not about demonstrating his strength but his target’s weakness.

In life, and in chess, Euthydemus relies not on skill, but inexperience, for his triumphs.

Character for Community

While Plato may have been deeply unfair to the Sophists, his literary creations are unforgettable. Euthydemus is a character worthy of lending his name elsewhere. We chess players should claim him like a hanging Queen. Why? Because, as I have argued, he aptly captures a type many chess players know but do not wish to model. In doing so, we can speak of “Euthydemus” while honoring Benjamin Franklin, a great promoter of chess who wanted it to be morally improving and community-strengthening and who wanted to “imitate Socrates.” The name “Euthydemus” is allusive, historical, and conceptually useful.

Some ethicists recommend thinking about exemplary people and modeling social and emotional responses to situations and activities after their example. Below are two famous paintings, one of Benjamin Franklin, the other of Socrates. 

Above, Lady Howe Checkmating Benjamin Franklin (1867) by Edward Harrison May; below, Aspasia Conversing with Socrates and Alcibiades (1801) by Nicolas-André Monsiau 

I like these paintings on their own, but I also like them together because they each place an eminent male figure at the same table with a woman who has the man’s full, respectful attention in a rigorous intellectual activity at times when women were not readily credited (it is true his opponent here was Lady Howe, nobly born and bred. What is often a fun fact to share, Socrates reports his having learned about rhetoric from a woman, the philosopher Aspasia. These pictures are vivid reminders of an ethical stance all chess players can take across the board toward anyone, regardless of present social standing.

In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin tells us of the time when he first took an active, even data-driven approach to his moral improvement. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” he told himself, giving himself exemplars of worthy outlooks and behaviors. Franklin placed Jesus and Socrates before him as complementary figures; let’s consider Euthydemus and Socrates/Franklin as contrasting figures.

In “The Morals of Chess,” to which I’ll devote a full rhetorical analysis in an upcoming entry, Franklin bears in mind the player who isn’t quite strong enough to see the onslaught:

Snatch not eagerly at every advantage offered by [your opponent’s] unskilfulness or inattention; but point out to him kindly that by such a move he places or leaves a piece in danger and unsupported; that by another he will put his king in a dangerous situation, &c. By this generous civility (so opposite to the unfairness above forbidden) you may indeed happen to lose the game to your opponent, but you will win what is better, his esteem, his respect, and his affection; together with the silent approbation and good will of impartial spectators.

(A passage worthy of memorization.) To win the “esteem” of one’s opponents in chess would be the objective of someone—perhaps that’s you—who seeks to build a community of players gathering happily to play the game, enjoy one another’s company, and maybe learn a few new things. “Go easy on your opponent,” Franklin says, when you see he is not as skilled as you. Euthydemus wouldn’t ever hear of such a thing. He wants to win esteem by being the stronger, Franklin by being the helper.

My father-in-law deserved better than Euthydemus. 

We all do.

A community strengthens ties over chess in Franklin County, Mississippi (2025 news segment)

Imitate Socrates. Imitate Franklin.

A Resource for Using Scholar’s Mate to Promote Mentorship & Community

This PDF is a lesson plan and student handout for a lesson on Scholar’s Mate, based directly on the ideas above. This resource introduces beginners to the Scholar’s Mate, showing both how it works and how stronger players can mentor rather than humiliate beginners. The goal is to articulate and clarify the values Franklin praised, and to model the interactions that foster supportive communities, making mentorship a community value. Chess outcomes as well as social-emotional learning outcomes are outlined.

References 

Aristotle (2019). The art of rhetoric. Trans. Robert C. Bartlett. U of Chicago P. 

Duffy, John (2016). “Writing involves making ethical choices.” Naming what we know: threshold concepts of writing studies. Eds. Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle. Utah State UP.

*By the time I fell for it, I had been playing with some friends for a little while and having fun. I now reflect that having a chess community at the time may well have shielded me from having the discouraging experience my father-in-law had.

†In large part, Plato’s dialogues were a creative effort to rehabilitate Socrates’s reputation after what Plato, Socrates’s student, regarded as a grave injustice in his mentor’s trial and execution. Plato treats the Sophists as part of the wider moral corruption that he believes made that injustice possible.