Chess Clones

We've all seen photos of someone playing chess against himself -- in my case I've seen dozens -- but playing chess against two copies of oneself? That's different. This photo was captioned,

Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Conservatives battle for control on a three-player chess board.

Since "all politics is local" and I'm not in that locality, I won't touch the political ramifications.

Election battleground © Flickr user Edward Webb under Creative Commons.

More relevant to me is the next statement in the caption,

This was taken in 2010 and only now uploaded due to overexposing my blue shirted clone, who is looking better after some editing.

I've highlighted the word in italics: clone. The photo is in four groups all titled using the same word -- 'Clone meets clone', 'My very own clone', etc. -- so now I know the name of the technique. As for 'three-player chess', Wikipedia has a page on the subject, appropriately titled Three-player chess. The page says,

Three-player chess variants (as well as other three-player games) are the hardest to design fairly, since the imbalance created when two players gang up against one is usually too great for the defending player to withstand.

The same must be true for politics.