Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

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Roger de Coverly
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Roger de Coverly » Sat May 07, 2016 2:43 pm

Alex McFarlane wrote: On the others I just restarted the game and would have added on the time after the control was reached.
That makes quite a lot of sense when there's an intermediate time control, particularly for the player with more time who wasn't the one who played the illegality.

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Jesper Norgaard
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Jesper Norgaard » Sat May 07, 2016 3:03 pm

Stewart Reuben wrote:Most people think that making deliberate illegal moves as a form of cheating is very rare. But putting the king next to the king in lightning chess used in the 1960s to be called a 'Harrison' in New York. The eponymous Harrison used to do that when in a lost position. We may have seen a deliberate illegal move by a GM against Bronstein in Hastings rapidplay in 1995.
Yesterday I saw a player cheat repeatedly in one blitz game by using one hand to move the pieces and the other to press the clock. The so-called 'arbiter' did not intervene. The player did not do it in subsequent games. The event was not FIDE Rated.
However that would hardly amount to more than a fraction of second pr. clock press. Hardly Al Capone stuff.
Stewart Reuben wrote: People do not seem to like accidentally illegal moves to lose automatically. That has always been the rule for blitz, but only came in for rapidplay 1 July 2014. Most people do not distinguish between the type of illegality, be it leaving the king en prise, moving a knight from e4 to g6, putting a pawn on the 8th rank and pressing the clock, etc. Indeed I know of only one person who singles out leaving or putting the king en prise differently.
I know of NOBODY who believes bad moves should not be punished if the opponent is good enough to take advantage. 50 years ago in NY, playing blitz for money, I used sometimes to offer the odds of my opponent taking their last move back when they had seen my reply.

Jesper's latest suggestion is good, but the punishment might be too trivial unless the increment is also reduced. Alex makes the cogent point that adjustment of the clock takes the arbiter some time. That is why 7.1 should be extended to cover 7.5b. I am not certain that it doesn't already do so.
I gave three reasons up thread to Alex McFarlane why this is not my recommendation. It is 1.Organisers would want to preserve 30 sec increment because they are guaranteed full game scores 2. Blitz increment 2 sec halved to 1 sec halved to 0.5 sec means drawn positions are no longer survivable on the increment 3. digital clocks can't handle half seconds.
Stewart Reuben wrote: A future clock might include such a halving option.
That would be awesome! This would need to be hidden below the clock just like the on/off button, I presume.
Stewart Reuben wrote: The reactions of people kibbitzing the games online would be interesting.

Jesper amended becomes: 7.5.b
"After the action taken under Article 7.5.a, for the first or second completed illegal move by a player the arbiter shall reduce his remaining thinking time on the clock by half, including halving the increment if any. Note should be taken of 7.1. For the third completed illegal move by the same player the arbiter shall declare the game lost by this player. However, the gmae is drawn...
You are right, I left out the statement "However the game is drawn..." by mistake. There needs to be something about different time periods, where these are also cut in half. The 7.1 allows the players to agree to not make adjustments to the time, just the illegal move and carry on. Is that your idea?
Stewart Reuben wrote: What then if there is no arbiter around? Presumably the players are self-arbiting and the clock adjustment is done by one of the two players.
I have added a clause up thread that the players may self-arbit in Rapid and Blitz. This could also go some way to save schedules for large Blitz tournaments, to make an example.

The post is from "Fri May 06, 2016 5:37 pm" and the clause is A.4.b after in bold.
In essence the players are allowed to self-arbit the illegal move correction and time correction themselves. It will only work if they can agree what happened, but my experience from Blitz is that it would work. It may work well in Blitz tournaments to avoid scheduling problems.
Last edited by Jesper Norgaard on Sat May 07, 2016 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

NickFaulks
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by NickFaulks » Sat May 07, 2016 4:52 pm

Stewart Reuben wrote: Most people do not distinguish between the type of illegality, be it leaving the king en prise, moving a knight from e4 to g6, putting a pawn on the 8th rank and pressing the clock, etc. Indeed I know of only one person who singles out leaving or putting the king en prise differently.
Stewart,

Following your earlier confrontational comments, I hope you will confirm that I am not the person you have in mind, since you know very well this is the precise opposite of everything I have said.
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Brian Towers
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Brian Towers » Sat May 07, 2016 9:26 pm

Alex McFarlane wrote:Does the arbiter write down the times and then reprogram the clock or go and get a second clock?
After a player once accused me of getting the adjustment wrong I now always write the times down first. It only takes two seconds and cuts out the arguments.
Alex McFarlane wrote:By the way the Laws don't say when the 2 minutes will be added. I've had three cases where one player was very short of time and the other had 6 minutes or more. On one of these I added on the 2 minutes immediately because I was asked to. On the others I just restarted the game and would have added on the time after the control was reached.
An excellent tip. Thank you!
Ah, but I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

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Jesper Norgaard
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Jesper Norgaard » Sat May 07, 2016 11:16 pm

Brian Towers wrote:
Alex McFarlane wrote:Does the arbiter write down the times and then reprogram the clock or go and get a second clock?
After a player once accused me of getting the adjustment wrong I now always write the times down first. It only takes two seconds and cuts out the arguments.
Absolutely recommendable, especially to cut any arguments.

I have seen an arbiter in Mexico mess up a reconstruction of a game, that was supposed to be on a separate board, on the same board they were playing, so that the original position was lost - one of my club mates was furious of that non professionalism. His argument was that the position was different, but the evidence had been spoiled.

I have seen several arbiters just correcting the clock on the fly - still writing it down first, assures a safe route to reconstruction, even if the correction is messed up.

E Michael White
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by E Michael White » Sat May 07, 2016 11:34 pm

Alex McFarlane wrote:By the way the Laws don't say when the 2 minutes will be added. I've had three cases where one player was very short of time and the other had 6 minutes or more. On one of these I added on the 2 minutes immediately because I was asked to. On the others I just restarted the game and would have added on the time after the control was reached.
I think this is unwise and can have consequences.

eg.Taking it as long play as there is a time control and the illegal move has not caused a loss, if player A has 6 minutes and B has less than 1 minute. B makes an illegal move and you don't add on 2 minutes. Then what do you do if B creates counterplay, causing A to slow down, then :-

A drops below 5 minutes and stops recording. B stops the clock, calls you over and you take 2 minutes to get there. B feels A should be recording the moves as in Article 8 and Law 8.4. should not apply. You have caused a problem which wouldn't exist if you had followed the laws.
Last edited by E Michael White on Sun May 08, 2016 12:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

Stewart Reuben
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Stewart Reuben » Sun May 08, 2016 12:00 am

Nick, it has been perfectly clear to me for some time that you thought leaving or putting the king en prise was quite different from other illegal moves. See your own comment on Sat May 07. If you don't think that, you had better explain your position. To me, you have frequenntly said:
if the player leaves or puts his king where it can be captured - that should lose, or at least subject to a huge penalty. Taking it off should be just like taking a queen, allowing which is usually a bad idea.
If a player makes a different type of illegal move, treat it differently, so there should be just a penalty.
It is you who have been confrontational, claiming I was deliberately misleading readers of this forum.

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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by NickFaulks » Sun May 08, 2016 8:19 am

Jesper Norgaard wrote: If he has only 1 second left in a Blitz game, that should be reduced to 0.5 seconds, which cannot be expressed, so his 1 second is just left as is. If there are 7 seconds left, it is reduced to 4, by rounding up to nearest 0.5 seconds from 3.5 seconds. The rounding bit should be clarified as well. But that is just nitty-gritty if the general principle of cutting his fixed time in half is accepted.
Consider a 1500m track race, with the two leaders 50m from the finish line. There is contact and one of them stumbles. He complains, and the race is halted while the referees review the incident. After a brief delay, they tell the runners to go back to where they were, perhaps with one of them set back five metres, and the race is restarted.

Does that sound reasonable? No, it doesn't, and it doesn't for a game of blitz chess either.
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Jesper Norgaard
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Jesper Norgaard » Sun May 08, 2016 2:04 pm

NickFaulks wrote: Consider a 1500m track race, with the two leaders 50m from the finish line. There is contact and one of them stumbles. He complains, and the race is halted while the referees review the incident. After a brief delay, they tell the runners to go back to where they were, perhaps with one of them set back five metres, and the race is restarted.

Does that sound reasonable? No, it doesn't, and it doesn't for a game of blitz chess either.
Stopping a race track and restoring that moment in time is only reasonable if you have a time device like the one in A Little Peace and Quiet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Peace_and_Quiet If you can freeze the runners in the air at the exact moment you need to, then this rewinding would make perfect sense. That is not the reality of running.

Chess games move ahead with robot steps in the form of chess moves, and stopping and rewinding a game has been part of Standard games since FIDE rules started, I believe. It comes quite naturally. I do wonder where I can find the history of the illegal move in chess - it must have evolved over time, although from the beginning certain rules were in hand that would deem some moves impossible, like 1.d2-e4.

Many Standard games are stopped today because of an illegal move, and rewound to the position before the offense. In some of those situations both players have less than 5 minutes on the clock - that is a direct proof that it will work in Blitz too. The only reason for wanting different rules in Blitz has been arbiter indolence and player Draconianism. For the arbiter declaring the game lost for a player making illegal move(s) it is good-riddance, and for the opponent it is a free point in the bag without any merit whatsoever. I guess a desire from organisers to avoid schedule delays has been a big push towards the now prevalent loss by illegal move in both Blitz and Rapid games.

I think we are better off with no death penalties in chess, just let the offender pay with his thinking time, so that schedules can be upheld. A 50% penalty will always work and will always be relatively fair compared to what the offender had.

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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Paul McKeown » Sun May 08, 2016 4:28 pm

Jesper Norgaard wrote:Many Standard games are stopped today because of an illegal move, and rewound to the position before the offense. In some of those situations both players have less than 5 minutes on the clock - that is a direct proof that it will work in Blitz too. The only reason for wanting different rules in Blitz has been arbiter indolence and player Draconianism. For the arbiter declaring the game lost for a player making illegal move(s) it is good-riddance, and for the opponent it is a free point in the bag without any merit whatsoever. I guess a desire from organisers to avoid schedule delays has been a big push towards the now prevalent loss by illegal move in both Blitz and Rapid games.
There is a huge difference between a blitz game and a normal game of chess in which the players find themselves with less than 5 minutes remaining to meet a time control. If you don't understand and feel that difference, then I really don't know how to help you. A blitz game is meant to finish in a very short period, and rather ridiculous things are part and parcel of the experience, and chaos is even part of the fun. There is no scoring of the game and the idea that one should start reconstructing the game from the point at which an illegal move has occurred is ridiculous and foolish. Not only that, it is a complete breach of the spirit of blitz. The forfeit penalty for an illegal move in blitz is perfectly in tune with the guillotine nature of the 5 minute time control or the balancing on the edge of a cliff nature of the 3 min/2 second time control. The only difficulty that FIDE got into was their daft idea at one stage that capturing the king as a means of displaying that one's opponent had made an illegal move (leaving his or her king in check) should itself be treated as an illegal move, contrary to a century of practise. The reasons given for this were pretty weak ("it is impossible to reconstruct"). How about just listening to and believing the players, and what about all the other ways it would be impossible to reconstruct if a feeble minded or lazy arbiter hadn't been paying attention?
Jesper Norgaard wrote:I think we are better off with no death penalties in chess, just let the offender pay with his thinking time, so that schedules can be upheld. A 50% penalty will always work and will always be relatively fair compared to what the offender had.
If you think that a 50% penalty for some inadvertent mistake (someone had knocked a piece from its original square and a player played it as natural from the square it had been displaced to, for instance), is equitable and not a "death penalty", then you must be some genius at time management. I would consider giving my opponent an hour's odds in a two hour game to be a huge disadvantage, and would expect to lose more than 50% of my games against an equal opponent, and mostly hope for draws in the remainder.

The old principle of two minutes penalty up to half of one's thinking time was perfectly fair, as was the addition of two minutes if the arbiter considered the opponent to have been disturbed. And the Laws provide sufficient stronger remedies in the unusual circumstance that the arbiter considers foul play to be the cause of an illegal move.

There has been a lot of changes to the Laws in the past twenty years or so, not all of which have seemed useful or an improvement. I would certainly hope that there were no substantive changes on the basis of some poorly thought out musings on some random internet forum.

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Jesper Norgaard
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Jesper Norgaard » Sun May 08, 2016 5:44 pm

Paul McKeown wrote: There is a huge difference between a blitz game and a normal game of chess in which the players find themselves with less than 5 minutes remaining to meet a time control. If you don't understand and feel that difference, then I really don't know how to help you.
I do feel that difference - it is just that I don't see it as a valid excuse for Draconian losses.
Paul McKeown wrote: A blitz game is meant to finish in a very short period, and rather ridiculous things are part and parcel of the experience, and chaos is even part of the fun. There is no scoring of the game and the idea that one should start reconstructing the game from the point at which an illegal game has occurred is ridiculous and foolish. Not only that, it is a complete breach of the spirit of blitz.
We couldn't disagree more. The vast majority of illegal moves in my Blitz games have been executed by my opponents, and I have scored a cheap point. In all of them the discovery of the illegal move was immediate and the resolution immediate as well - a Draconian loss. I don't like to win like that. I think it is stupid. And I think the game could go on, with a halving of his time.

However, unlike the loss by mobile ringing, which is just as stupid (if no cheating is taking place), I can't pretend it didn't happen. The game cannot continue as nothing happened after the illegal move.
Paul McKeown wrote: The forfeit penalty for an illegal move in blitz is perfectly in tune with the guillotine nature of the 5 minute time control or the balancing on the edge of a cliff nature of the 3 min/2 second time control.
On the contrary - I feel you should earn your victories just as in Standard games of chess. I guess I don't agree that Draconianism should be welcome just because time is short.
Paul McKeown wrote: If you think that a 50% penalty for some inadvertent mistake (someone had knocked a piece from its original square and a player played it as natural from the square it had been displaced to, for instance)
Come again? Never heard or seen anything remotely like it - you are not pulling my leg, are you?
Paul McKeown wrote:I would consider giving my opponent an hour's odds in a two hour game to be a huge disadvantage, and would expect to lose more than 50% of my games against an equal opponent, and mostly hope for draws in the remainder.
I played a handicap tournament which proved the time handicap could not completely eliminate the difference in strength. I was surprised. Naturally you cannot play with the same strategies as in a normal game with equal time. You have to adapt. A good Blitz player can.
Paul McKeown wrote: The old principle of two minutes penalty up to half of one's thinking time was perfectly fair
Have never heard of it. How does that penalty apply to a player with 3 minutes? 1 minute? Was that ever a FIDE rule?
Paul McKeown wrote: ... as was the addition of two minutes if the arbiter considered the opponent to have been disturbed.
Adding two minutes in Blitz has hardly been adequate under any circumstances. This is reduced to 1 minute in FIDE laws for Blitz although it just makes it half as daft.
Paul McKeown wrote: And the Laws provide sufficient stronger remedies in the unusual circumstance that the arbiter considers foul play to be the cause of an illegal move.
How do you determine foul play to be the cause of an illegal move? I would call that arbiter bias ... however you are drifting from the discussion it seems to me.

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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Paul McKeown » Sun May 08, 2016 5:52 pm

Let's just say, Jesper, that you are rambling. It might help if you went away and studied how the Laws of Chess have evolved; sadly I doubt it.

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Jesper Norgaard
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Jesper Norgaard » Sun May 08, 2016 7:03 pm

Paul McKeown wrote:Let's just say, Jesper, that you are rambling. It might help if you went away and studied how the Laws of Chess have evolved; sadly I doubt it.
Unfortunately I think you are trolling instead of rambling. However, I cannot prove it.

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Michael Farthing
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Michael Farthing » Sun May 08, 2016 9:46 pm

It's as relevant for FIDE to legislate on blitz as it is for it to legislate on tiddly winks.
Blitz is a fun thing to do in an odd five minutes and if it ever gets remotely more serious than that then its advocates should be put in a tiny little room and allowed to play each other to their heart's content - but shouldn't be allowed to pollute normal human society! As for having an arbiter!!
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Re: Do you have to compete promotion to win ?

Post by Stewart Reuben » Mon May 09, 2016 1:57 am

Jesper >Many Standard games are stopped today because of an illegal move, and rewound to the position before the offense<
Perhaps as frequently as 1 in 1000 games?
Blitz has long been played that an illegal move lost, provided it was claimed.

Michael Farthing >It's as relevant for FIDE to legislate on blitz as it is for it to legislate on tiddly winks.<
Since blitz is FIDE Rated, it makes perect sense for there to be regulations. The FIDE Rules for blitz were certainly codified by 1977. At that time it was called 'lightning'. I tried to avoid the name blitz as it reminded me of the Second World War, but eventually I gave way.
The games played in the US recently were to a very high standard and watched avidly by many on the internet. There are various types of blitz championships which are taken very seriously.

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