Hacker News Reader

> The game was first published in Freude am Schach (The Pleasure of Chess) by Gerhard Henschel in 1959.

That book used the conditional tense, to convey uncertainty about the game’s authenticity (‘la partie suivante qui aurait été gagnée par Einstein contre le grand physicien Robert Oppenheimer’)

source: https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/winter04.html item: 3533

View on HN

For those who don't read French: that construction could roughly be translated as "the following game was supposedly won [or: 'is said to have been won', etc.] by Einsten against the great physicist Robert Oppenheimer".

The conditional tense here in French is used to report that something has been asserted by someone, without taking a position one way or the other on whether the assertion is true. I don't think there is an exact grammatical equivalent in English.

Something like "which would have been won [if the reports are to believd]" perhaps.

I think in English “would have been won” implies that it was not in fact won.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com