It's a depiction of the "Yugoslav Attack" (also known as the "Rauzer System" or the "St. George Attack." Here's how we came to use it.
Two chess boards appear in the book -- one with the entire board in view and a second with a quarter of the board unseen. The graphics are used to illustrate that poker is a game of incomplete information. The positions of the pieces on the boards have no meaning in the example, but in this business, you have to be sure that everything makes sense.
Originally, pieces were simply arranged on a board with little attention paid, just as a metaphor. But close to press time, Annie sent Anthony Curtis an email asking him to "ensure that the board was legal," meaning that none of the pieces was in a position that would be impossible, given the rules of the game. Anthony checked and found that it was not a legal board. He doesn't play chess, but knows the rules and was able to make the adjustment.
However, Anthony then began thinking that this detail warranted a little more attention and sent the example as it then stood to Fezzik, the sports betting expert and two-time winner of the Hilton SuperContest, who was at one time a highly rated chess player. Fezzik wrote back immediately, in his typically straightforward manner.
"This looks like a match between two seven-year-olds." He sent a link to the Yugoslav attack, with this explanation: "I think this opening is appropriate for Annie's book. It's a wild tactical mêlée, with both sides often trying to checkmate the other. Not a boring positional snoozefest, where you try to safely ease into a long drawn-out end game."
By the way, while Decide includes several displays of table position, those and the chess boards are the only graphics in the book. This is a book about how to think, not a collection of charts and graphs to memorize. And if you like the way Fezzik thinks, check out his paid sports-betting message boards at LVASportsboards.com.
