Author: Adrien Regimbald
Date: 15:14:46 05/16/00
Hello, About the Tiviakov (I don't know if I will ever spell this name right.. :P) incident - A lot of you are still demonstrating a lack of understanding of the rules of chess. It seems that lots of you are basing your standards for chess games on what happens on FICS/ICC. On FICS/ICC, you can flag someone in a completely dead lost position and there is nothing your opponent can do about it, and you can flag in a completely drawn position too. This is not the case in OTB games! (The only reason why things are like this on FICS/ICC is that it is completely impractical to try to enforce the rules as they are OTB, since there are no TDs and/or arbiters around to resolve such incidents) Some of you seem to think that the operator was doing Tiviakov a favour by offering a draw with 2 minutes left. This is completely untrue. Tiviakov at any time could have stopped the clock, called over the TD and claimed a draw. Also - if Tiviakov thought he couldn't have won the game considering the situation on the clock, he would have offered the draw himself - he clearly thought he still had chances to win the game! A few other people seem to think that offering the draw at 2 minutes was inappropriate and that the operator would be doing Tiviakov a favour by offering a draw with say only a few seconds left to go. This is also untrue. With 1 second to go, Tiviakov can stop the clock and call over a TD, once again claimin g a draw. Now, the last group is a bit less clear-cut: some of you think the operator should have waited until (and if) Tiviakov made a blunder to offer the draw. Even then - Tiviakov could have called over the TD! There are two possibilities here (I am talking in general terms, not just this particular game): if the player has made a huge blunder and is obviously losing now and not winning anymore, he can claim his opponent was trying to win on the flag. This is a bit of a dubious claim, but such claims do get issued and I'd say maybe 30% of the time this will work. The other possibility (which I think is more of what happened in the game) is a smaller blunder which throws away the win. The player can claim a draw here .. and would be successful probably about 70% of the time - the other 30% of the time, the TD might choose to see if the other player is actually trying to make progress or not - if it proves clear that the other player is trying to simply win by flagging their opponent, the TD will award the draw. Incidentally, it used to be that such sudden death time situations simply didn't exist (and it's not even very long ago). I've been playing chess in organized tournaments for about 6 or 7 years, and I can remember the first couple years I played in, almost every tournament had continuous time controls - 40/120 followed by 30/90 to be followed by as many 30/60's as were needed for the game to finish, and if there was only one or two games left going on really long, they would be adjourned to allow the next round to progress. The movement to sudden death time controls seems to be a result of our fast paced society that doesn't have any patience at all. Many players (especially the stronger ones) grumble constantly about sudden death time controls. I don't think that getting involved in heated incidents with the players over sudden death time control issues is going to help in terms of computers being allowed to play in GM tournaments. As to whoever said that the tournament organizers in this case have the gold, that is technically true, but not the analogy I was making in this case. In this case, the gold is the opportunity to play games against GM opposition. Trust me, if the players decide they don't want to play computers at all anymore, computers will never see the light of day again in a human tournament. Regards, Adrien.
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