Chess opening databases added a new line on Monday, after Alex Botez called with king-three against a pair of queens in a heads-up poker match and took both of them. It sits under the kind of code normally reserved for variations grandmasters have argued over for a century.
The line is being called the Botez Gambit Reversed. The original Botez Gambit, named for the years Botez has spent leaving her own queen where an opponent can take it on stream, is old enough that her viewers type the name before the queen is actually gone. It had never been recorded running in the other direction. Archivists spent the weekend checking, and found nothing.
Closer In
The hand came in the semifinal of the ClubWPT Gold Poker Champs, an eight-player heads-up event Botez went on to win for $250,000. Her opponent was dealt two queens. She called with king-three. A deuce of diamonds arrived on the river, and both queens left the table in the form of a pot pushed to her side. Three separate chess databases logged the hand within the hour. Two of them used algebraic notation, which has no symbol for a deuce of diamonds. One of them used a pawn.
The entry did not go through unopposed. A working group of eleven opening theorists met over video call for six hours on Sunday to decide whether a poker hand can count as a chess move at all. The vote went 6 to 5. The dissent ran to 4,000 words and argued that nothing in poker is ever sacrificed on purpose. It was withdrawn after another member pointed out that calling queens with king-three looks exactly like a sacrifice right up until the river.
The engines have been no help. Stockfish rated the call a blunder at depth 40, asked for the turn card, and has not produced an evaluation since. The hand has been fed into chess software more than 90,000 times since Friday, and no two programs agree on where the evaluation bar belongs when the deciding move is a two.
Her own stream has had a harder adjustment. On her first chess broadcast after the win, chat spent the opening eight moves watching her queen instead of the board, ready to type the name the moment it went. She moved the queen twice and put it somewhere safe both times. Chat did not know what to do with that. It posted the crown emoji roughly 40,000 times, and then the game ended in a draw, which nobody had prepared a reaction for either.
After That
Poker has been slower to react, mostly because poker players have only ever heard the word gambit used about a slow-roll. Two tournament directors asked whether the reversal carries a penalty. It does not. A third asked whether it can be run twice.
The databases list the new line with one annotation: it has been played exactly once, by a player who has never managed to reproduce it on a chessboard. Botez has three more heads-up matches scheduled this fall. The theorists have asked her, formally, to keep her queens where they are and to keep taking everyone else's.
Nothing about this happened. Alex Botez really did win the ClubWPT Gold Poker Champs heads-up event for $250,000, beating a pair of queens with king-three along the way, and the Botez Gambit really is her viewers' name for losing a queen. No chess database has added it as an opening, and no committee voted on anything.
