The two spent the entire train ride discussing parallels of chess and military strategy to the point where they diagrammed famous battles in history and tried to create scenarios on the chessboard. Hall had illustrated the battle of Cannae where the Carthaginians under General Hannibal crushed the Romans with brilliant encirclement tactics and related it to a fascinating story of 1967 Swedish Champion, Rolf Martens . Martens came out of retirement to play in a 1984 blitz tournament and came in a respectable third. The article states,



"But it was not the result that caught people's eyes, but the way he got it. He present a complete repertoire of totally unknown openings that gave the other top players a good laugh until thy ran up against them themselves. One after the other they had to resign, and even in the post-mortem the openings proved hard to crack, however outlandish they looked."

