Sunday 16 December 2007

Two strange tournament incidents

As pointed out in the comments section on Zong Yuan Zhao's GM norm, there was a strange incident at the World Junior. A dispute over an incorrect repetition claim led to a game being restarted at 11 pm, the night before the final round. One version of the events can be found at chessvibes, while the alternate position can be found by following the links from the chessvibes story.
Without going into the detail of the dispute (as it is third or fourth hand by the time you hear it from me), to me there is an issue of sportsmanship involved. IF (with capitals) I refused to accept an arbiters decision, and it turned out that my refusal was based on my ignorance of the rules, I wouldn't then search for any other technical deficiencies in the ruling, but simply accept that my protest was without foundation and withdraw it. If the arbiter erred in other areas I would still inform the organisers of this, but Iwouldn't use this as justification to change the result of the game.

The other strange incident was from the Commonwealth Championships in India. Apparently the organisers only had enough clocks for 80 boards, and rather than locate more, simply placed the clocks on the top 80 boards, and started EVERYONE (all 110 boards or so) playing. Once a game was finished on the top boards the clock would then be transported to the lower boards and the players would be given an equal distribution of time. Clearly this system relied upon the goodwill of the players without clocks, as it would be a simple case of not moving at the start of the game, knowing full well you aren't losing any time from your (eventual) clock.
Of course I wonder how a situation came about in the first place, given that the bulk of entries should have been received in advance.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you still want to discuss rating sytsems? Chessbase news currently has an interesting article on the Elo sytsem. Now, wouldn't it be great if now that Australia has joined the masses and signed up to the Kyoto protocol it also adopted the Elo system?

Shaun Press said...

http://chessexpress.blogspot.com/2007/05/on-blog-comments.html

Anonymous said...

link does not seem to work??

Garvin

Shaun Press said...

It is a link to an old post on this blog about my responses in the comments section. Blogger chopped it off at the end.
Basically what it says is that if I know who you are, or you identify yourself, then I am happy to have a discussion, if you choose to remain anonymous then don't expect a reply.

Have a look in the May 2007 archives for the original post.

Anonymous said...

Apparently Alex Jule threw a wobbly during one of her games, as her opponent was using huge amounts of time. She told an arbiter to either forfeit her opponent or get them a clock.

Shannon had taken her own clock, and as she and Gareht were normally playing up high enough to be allocated a clock she was able to lend out her clock to other Aussies, but it was a very strange thing to be happening at an international tournament.

If the organisers had let people know in advance I am sure most overseas competitors could have brought their own clock.

The number of clocks diminished over time - presumably as they became faulty or ran out of batteries.

Jenni