Chess with Napoleon would be fun: German minister

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) - Chess-loving German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck admitted on Tuesday he sometimes glanced at chess problems in newspapers during parliamentary sittings, and said he would have relished taking on Napoleon.

"I would have liked to know whether he played chess in the same way he planned out his campaigns, especially the battle of Austerlitz," Steinbrueck told the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an interview.

The French emperor smashed a Russian-Austrian army at Austerlitz in December 1805 in one of his most celebrated victories hailed by historians as a tactical masterpiece.

Steinbrueck said his Danish grandmother taught him how to play at the age of six and he noted there were many parallels between chess and politics.

"How do you prepare an attack? How do you defend yourself?" said the minister, who is battling to balance Germany's federal budget amid a slowdown in Europe's largest economy.

Asked whether he had ever focused on a chess problem rather than a dull cabinet meeting, the SPD politician said: "No. But I admit that I sometimes had chess puzzles from newspapers lying in front of me on the government bench in the Bundestag (lower house of parliament)."

(Reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich; editing by Andrew Dobbie)