headcanon that both erik and charles are absolute shite at chess but they both assume they’re fantastic because they never play anyone else
Charles probably suspected something was wrong when Erik’s rook “jumped” Charles’ Bishop, but didn’t want to admit he didn’t know that rule.
“Ah, the ‘moving three pawns at once’ opening. Audacious, Erik, audacious.”
The prison gards in x2 watching the game over the cameras like…
“W-What are they…what’s going on – Matt look at this shit.”
My favorite part of this is that on a meta level, in the X-men movies, one of the random trivia facts I’ve heard is that neither Ian McKellan nor Patrick Stewart know how to play chess, so they just randomly moved pieces around the chessboard when they said their lines. Every once in a while they would do something dramatic and symbolic like going to checkmate, when the script would call for it, but the rest of the time they have no idea what they’re doing.
So, in a way, this is canon 🙂