Last weekend I was asked to “direct” an individual/team tournament for a big organization, with kids K-5. Inasmuch as it was to be non-rated, I asked what protocols they wanted me to follow, but I didn’t get a response.
When I got there, I found out that the players were allowed 30 minutes of time on the wall clock, total; no chess clocks in use. After that time, someone (not me!) would adjudicate unfinished games in favor of a player who had “three points” material advantage - that is, three pawns or a piece. If neither player had such an advantage, then the game would be declared a draw.
Anyway, I stayed out of the business of adjudicating games, and made pairings on the basis of the results reported to me. My question is, how common is this scheme? I’ve heard of it before, but I’ve never seen it put to use.
I’ve heard of counting points to determine a winner at the end of the allotted time. It is generally used when the proctors and players are not strong enough to properly adjudicate a position.
The upside includes getting the games done within a set period of time.
The downside includes: giving players slightly behind or significantly ahead an incentive to stall; giving the win to a person in a lost position (such as if you sac a queen for a forced mate and your opponent takes it and then just sits); giving players an incentive to merely count points instead of evaluating the position.
The week before last I blithely let my opponent win three pawns because I figured there was no way he could even hold the draw after he opened up his position to do so (as black it resulted in me having connected passers on e3 and d3 with a bishop on d4 in the late middlegame/early endgame position). I would have been perturbed to have my won position adjudicated as a loss.
On the unrated sections for younger beginners where we would prefer not to put clocks on to speed things along, we adhere to the general principle that “if you can’t checkmate, you don’t win”. Typically the “long” running games (relatively) fall into one of three categories (not mutually exclusive):
One or both players are trying valiantly to keep score without being very good at it.
One player is well ahead but clueless how to force checkmate.
One player is generally unwilling to move.
With #1, we praise them for their diligence but suggest rather strongly that they just concentrate on playing chess for now. With #3, we inform them of their God-given right to resign if they really don’t want to play any more. And with #2, we give the player with the superior position x moves (where x is probably triple the number that it actually should take) to checkmate or the game will be a draw. It’s pretty rare that anyone put in that situation has even made any progress towards checkmate in the allotted number of moves.
We generally aim for 45 minutes per round. 30 seems really short. Around 30 is when we start deciding what approach we should follow with the remaining games. Quite a few beginner games somewhat naturally run to 20-25 minutes, so a hard end at 30 really doesn’t give you much time to recognize which games will need special attention.
I’ve only run one or two events were adjudication was used, but my procedure (as a 1400/1500 player) was this:
I looked quickly at the game to see if one side had an obvious positional advantage or a strong mating net in place.
If a player had either of those, I asked him (out of earshot of his opponent) how he would plan to win the game. If he had no idea what to do (and many players under 1000 would fall into that category), I would adjudicate the game as a draw.
You and Tom Doan are both strong enough to adjudicate most scholastic games (and the ones you’d be out of your depth at likely would not be played at an event using adjudication). The OP described a situation generally used when the people running the event may have sub-500 strength and be even more clueless than the players.
P.S. If you only took one player off to the side then that may give hints as to whether or not the player had the better position. It takes longer, but always taking White and then Black off to the side would be more neutral.
There are schools in DFW that unfortunately use this approach. What results is this–when their players in their very nice chess
uniforms go to play in regular USCF rated events, about 10 or so minutes into the rounds, the hands start to go up. Asking the players
how I can help, they ask " Is it time to declare winners, for now I am winning". As many realize, in novice level scholastic chess
winning on move 15 quite often means being down a queen on move 16. Chance as to when the TD comes by to adjudicate has
as much as anything else fo do with whom wins. Certainly, checkmate for the most part, does not come into the picture.
So the kids become frustrated when told that we try to avoid whenever possible such actions.
shouldnt this issue almost be moot? I mean one td can buy a copy of shredder for their phone/tablet/what have you for 8.99 (or stockfish for free!), pop the position in and BOOM, independent adjudication!
I realize this may also be flawed (ie: the winning side is down a piece but has a clever trap they may or may not see to win the queen for nothing, or there’s some mating combination, but it’s better than human error?
The problem with using Shredder (or any other program) for adjudication is that real players, especially low rated ones, don’t have the skills Shredder has, so you would need to set a fairly large threshold for what winning margin to use. What positions Shredder (or a GM) can win from and what positions a sub-600 player can win from are markedly different. (That’s why I liked to ask the player with the ‘advantage’, if he had no clue what to do with it, why give him a point he probably couldn’t earn?)
Yes, that could still be better than what a 1600 player might decide.
If you don’t have clocks, I don’t know what alternatives there are.
My experience with a very similar (k-5, G/15 time control, no really good players, with clocks), was that in three years, we only had one loss due to running out of time. We had lots of draws due to not being able to mate with a king and queen or king and rook.
With that in mind, there is one other way I’ve seen the problem handled. Most games will be over within 20 minutes. If the club can have just a handful of clocks available, inform the kids that any game still going after 20 minutes will have a chess clock put down with 5 minutes on the clock for each player.
When looking at the games that are still running, most will have an obvious pending winner at the 20 minute mark, so you can use the few clocks you have on the games where they appear needed.
I had the pleasure of watching non-chessplaying adjudicators simply count units and award victory to the student with the most. In this wonderous event cookies and punch were served after the first round to really accelerate things! At least the trophies were shiny.
I get your point, and generally agree with it, But, Soccer Mom likes the idea of G/30 no
delay a whole lot better. Thus, this is a far better way to get MANY more kids involved
with USCF rated chess. I mean, really, if they do not come, then what is the point??
I used to coach a chess team that played in a non-USCF tournament, and when I first began coaching, they used a procedure something like this, except for three differences:
The wall time per match was 90 minutes, not 30. One year, they tried to shorten it to 60 minutes, but the coaches protested because of a noticeable increase in adjudicated games, so they changed it back to 90.
3 points is a ridiculously small margin. That would mean that a player with a King and a Bishop or a King and a Knight would win against a player with just a King! To get an adjudicated win, a player had to have a 6 point advantage.
A player who was behind in pieces could still get an adjudicated win if he could explain how he had an unbeatable winning strategy (so that a player couldn’t respond to, say, a Queen sacrifice by just not moving until the time for the match had run out).
The really amazing thing was that after some complaints by coaches about the unfairness of adjudication, it was revealed by the organization that ran the tournament that they had a set of chess clocks sufficient in number to cover all of the games (16 per match), but had stopped using them several years before because they felt they weren’t needed! The coaches collectively told them that the clocks were, indeed, needed, and the clocks were used in every subsequent tournament they ran.
I’ve run a total of 18 scholastic G/30 tournaments, and have only had about half a dozen games that were decided by a fallen flag, though there were some other games that were decided by foolish moves made because someone was short on time.
After having run hundreds of these, your ratios are about right. But, what every round there generally are those, generally the same players, (and quite frequently the same novice players whom for some reason
taking additional time does little to increase the chances of a quality move), who hold up the tournament.
G/30 no delay is truly the best ticket for higher scholastic attendance. Worth a try
Rob Jones