Friday Funny

This may be one of those "You had to be there" moments, but I found it very funny at the time. Monday night at the club I played one of the kids in the last round. Neither of us had a set out, so we used one of the club's sets that someone else had put out. Our club's sets are what I refer to as a mutt set. The pieces have come from a number of different sets, so the white pieces in particular tend to be 3 or 4 different shades of white. Mutt sets kind of annoy me. I like all the pieces to be the same color of white.

After a pawn trade early in the game I noticed that one of the black pawns was from those weighted plastic sets with the fat pawns. I said "j'adoube" and replaced it with the normal sized black pawn that had been captured. Several moves later I'm staring at the board and notice that my e pawn is smaller then all the other pawns. Again I say "j'adoube" and replace the little pawn with a normal sized pawn. I put it down next to the fat black pawn that I had replaced earlier. My opponent looks at the two pawns standing side by side, and says with the straightest face, "I'm down by half a pawn." I had to do everything I could not to burst out laughing. It was the way he said it, that just had me cracking up.

I guess you had to be there, but here's a picture of the pawns next to normal sized pawns.

Half pawn, pawn, pawn, fat pawn.