English Chess Forum

My Club was recently joined by someone who hadn't played since he was a youngster, many years ago.

One evening our bottom team needed a substitute for its bottom board so, at very short notice, we turned to the newcomer. With very few minutes to go, we satisfied ourselves that he was familiar with match conditions such as clock use. All seemed well.

But then, just as we were distributing a scoresheet to each player, he commented, "Oh, I shan't be bothering with that - my game will hardly be worth preserving."

Quickly, for the games were about to start, we pointed out that writing your moves down was a strict requirement of the league, and that anyway it wouldn't be fair if only one of the players was recording.

He understood and fully appreciated this. It goes without saying that fielding an unprepared or insufficiently experienced player is the fault of the Club or Team Captain, certainly not the player.

The game went ahead. Both sides enjoyed the see-saw battle but eventually our player lost. Here's his scoresheet:



We told him to write his moves down, so that's what he did!

It is a pretty good effort for a first scoresheet - I have seen much worse attempts made to keep score by very experienced players.

Definitely Is it actually one players moves, or both on the one column?

MartinCarpenter wrote:Definitely Is it actually one players moves, or both on the one column?

It's just White's moves - though for some reason he did record Black's very first move too.

Ohhh, thats what he is doing, I thought he was just using both sides of the scoresheet.

It would probably make a fun challenge to try and reconstruct the game based only on the white moves - I know there are players out there who would take that sort of thing on.

Think it might be more or less possible for a super GM game, for a random standard one? Less sure

Joey Stewart wrote:It would probably make a fun challenge to try and reconstruct the game based only on the white moves - I know there are players out there who would take that sort of thing on.

Cracker! My first thought too. Get on with it then. Great way to waste an evening

MSoszynski wrote: We told him to write his moves down, so that's what he did!

With increasing use of increments and removal of intermediate time controls, a technique used by some players in time pressure may be falling out of use. Namely that they write only their own moves down. That's completely legal in the last five minutes before a non 30 second increment time control. In the absolute last five minutes, any scoring is optional.

David Robertson wrote:

Joey Stewart wrote:It would probably make a fun challenge to try and reconstruct the game based only on the white moves - I know there are players out there who would take that sort of thing on.

Cracker! My first thought too. Get on with it then. Great way to waste an evening

I don't think it can be possible to arrive at a unique solution in a chess problem sense, unless it's a very peculiar game, although to mis-quote the late great Eric Morecambe, it may be possible to get the right moves; just not necessarily in the right order.

Maybe he decided that his opponent's moves weren't worth preserving!

I suspect the player was just told he had to record his moves - so he did just that

Very amusing and yes despite only writing his own moves its a pretty decent first effort.

We have a bloke in Leeds (who granted doesn't speak English as a first language) and he is incapable of keeping his moves in the numbered boxes, and takes up about 5 columns per move, by the time he has finished a game he has killed a small rain forest as he's used about 6 score sheets. This, combined with the fact he fancies himself as something of a hustler and moves at break neck speed, has caused more than a few disputes in the past