**SPOILERS** Obnoxious and narcissist world champion Grand Chess Master Emmett Clyton, Laurence Harvey,is sweating bullets over his upcoming match with former undefeated Russian Chess Master Tomlin Dudek, Jack Kruschen. Clyton knows deep down inside that old man Dudek could easily whip his a** in any chess game that he has with him.
With the big champion game scheduled for the next day Clyton is seen hanging around the hotel trying to get a glimpse of the grand old master. Clyton wants to get an idea of what makes the Russian Chess Master tic and how he can defeat him at the game that he has no equals in having never lost a game of chess since he started playing it when he was six years old.
Dudek noticing Clyton snooping around the hotel lobby get's the young man to follow him outside. Confronting him Dudek offers to treat Clyton to a free meal which is about the best medicine that the thin and scrawny-looking Clyton could have to settle him down. Dudek plays a game of chess with Clyton on the restaurant tablecloth and then takes it back to the hotel, after the restaurant closed, to finish it. To his ultimate shock and horror the self-doubting Clyton is then soundly defeated by the clever and confident Dudek. Going to pieces over his loss Clyton concocts a plan to get rid of Dudek before he can play him in the upcoming world chess match. The plan is to shove Dudek down the hotel garbage shoot, where he'd be compacted to death, and make it look like an accident! or even better, if the body isn't found, look like the Great Tomlin Dudek chickened out and checked out of town to avoid the disgrace of being beaten by the "king of Chess" himself Emmett Clyton.
Watching the movie I at first thought that Clyton was really the super genius that he climes to be. I changed my mind about Clyton's ability when he couldn't figure out that by treating the snail loving Dudek with a couple of orders of snails, smothered in globs of high cholesterol butter and smelly garlic, would be enough to do the trick;in killing the overweight and diabetic Dudek. Then just pushing him down a garbage shoot which he unfortunately, to Clyton shock and surprise, survived!
Let. Columbo, Peter Falk, of the L.A homicide division is called on the case even though Dudek is still alive. Columbo notices a number of things about Dudek's accident that just doesn't check out. He also sees what a strange bird the pompous and arrogant Clyton is when he interviews him about his whereabouts at the time of Dudek's "accident". Lt. Columbo also notices that Clyton is deft and without his hearing aid he couldn't hear an hydrogen bomb go off even it it detonated right on top of his head!
Clyton finding out what medication that the unconscious Dudek was taking, by memorizing it, from a note that Miss. Robinson (Heidi Bruhl), a good friend of both him and Dudek, showed him sneaks into Dudek's empty hotel room. Clyton switches the medication so it would kill instead of cure Dudek when it's injected into his system. Suddenly going into shock and flat-lining as soon as the spiked medication is given to him Dudek is now no longer a threat to Clyton in either beating him in a game of chess or fingering him as the one who tried to murder him.
Clyton for all his smarts made one fatal mistake in his plan to do Dudek in. It all had to do with his hearing aid being broken, and thus not being able to hear anything,at that time he attempted to murder him. It's that fatal error on Clyton's part that Lt. Columbo quickly noticed and in an elaborate reenactment of the event had the cockily smug and condescending, to Lt. Columbo, Clyton lose his cool. That together with him being soundly beaten by an outright armature, in a 30 man chess game, completely destroy Clyton's alibi in not having anything to do with Dudek's accident and later murder.
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