That’s a fair question. In my opinion, the answer is “almost never.” Adjudication is an obsolete relic, and I find it hard to come up with any plausible scenarios where it should be used. About all I can think of would be: building about to close, no way at all that the game can be resumed later (e.g. one of the players is flying home to Uzbekistan), and they can’t agree on a result.
BTW, I don’t think the example given in 18G1 is a very good one, since it is not really an adjudication – it’s forfeiting a player for refusal to follow the rules. I don’t quite see why doing this for leaving the playing area without permission differs from, say, forfeiting a player for making too much noise, offering a bribe, or taking all his clothes off and mooning his opponent.
I don’t think a TD would be sanctioned for doing this, since it is possible to squeeze that reading out of 18G, but it would show poor judgment on the TD’s part, and I certainly wouldn’t hire such a TD or recommend him for advancement.
35 years ago in a team match, our team’s fifth board had a heart attack at the board while his opponent was out abusing his lungs. After the ambulance took the player away, none of us were in any mood to continue our games. Since he was busted, my opponent resigned, and the remaining games were drawn to result in a tie match.
I had never met the man, nor had most of the other players. Nevertheless, I was discombobulated the rest of the day. I could no more have played decent chess than performed open heart surgery.
I don’t understand this. Certainly there was a “meeting of the minds” to play the game. Generally a forfeit is only given when that “meeting of the minds” does not take place, e.g. one player thinks he’s directed the TD to withdraw him, and doesn’t think that he should have been paired for that round. I’d rule, and I think that most of the other TDs would, too, that once each player has made a move, there is a “meeting of the minds”. Compare this situation to one which has a player’s phone ring. In some (most?) tournaments, this would cause the player to be forfeited immediately. That’s a ratable game, regardless of the position on the board.
I’ll take a lesson from this thread, that all the most experienced TDs without exception are saying the same thing. The TD should not take the position on the board into account when a player must leave, no matter what the reason is. If a heart attack isn’t a good enough reason, I cannot imagine that there would be a better one – even the building closing and the players refusing to finish the game outside “under the stars” before one of them departed to Uzbekistan.
This whole thread is a good example of the kinds of discussions that make for good answers on the ANTD and NTD exams; i.e., take a position–site the rules–defend the position–look at all points of view.
I don’t know what precedents exist in chess or other sports, and I have no cause to doubt the people who’ve cited some up above. But what my gut tells me is that a medical emergency is an involuntary adjournment, and it should be treated as an adjournment. If the game is never finished, then so be it; the game is never finished. If it’s a matter of determining prizes, then give the healthy player whatever he’d receive if his opponent had failed to show up at all (unless there already exists a rule dictating the value of unfinished adjourned games), but don’t rate the game. You can’t rate it – it was never completed, and only games that meet an end condition (checkmate, resignation, agreed draw, technical or adjudicated draw, or time expiration) should be considered for rating purposes.
I’ll have to look through my TD notebook, but I seem to recall at least 2 situations at nationals, with several NTDs consulting each other, where they determined that games where several moves were made did not constitute a ‘meeting of the minds’ and scored it as a forfeit win/loss
The one thing I have noticed in this and other situations is it will be scored as a 1f 0F in the system and those don’t get rated. So I prefer to say that by the tournament rules you are ‘adjudicating’ the game because forfeiting in the pairing software cause a game to not be rated.
This would fall under you ‘each player making one move clause’ but I know of a game between a 1st time player and an experienced con artist, where the new player was white.
The new player made his first move and did not hit the clock. It was Game/30. The other player just sat there and didn’t move waiting for the new guy to hit the clock… His flag fell 30 minutes later and his opponent claimed a win on time. IMO that game is not rateable.
When the Kid raised his hand the TD’s told him there was a reason that his opponent wasn’t moving… When he asked why, they said he needed to think about what he was supposed to do each time he moved and see if he had finished his turn. The player’s coach complained that was ‘too much information’ for the TD to be giving the player (he trained his players to do this to win games).
Funny part was that coach got jumped by another teams coach for his players ‘methods’ later in the same tournament.
If memory serves, in other endeavers (such as tennis) an injury that sidelines a person results in the person losing that competition.
You need to put an etc. on that list. A couple more to add would be an adjudicated win (18G1 - I’ve never had to actually do it, but mentioning that it was an option resulted multiple times in getting players to actually play their games) and a TD-enforced loss (such as from a ringing cell phone).
One interesting option would be if it was a SD time control (skip the obvious jokes please), a delay clock was not being used, and the apparently winning player requested to be penalized down to two minutes to enable making an ILC draw claim.
The con artist should have waited until the kid had 30 seconds left on his clock, then reminded him to punch the clock. 10 moves (at most) later when the kid flags, there’s nothing anyone can do about recording it as a rated game.
Or maybe it was a delay or increment clock. Those are less fun. It’s a good argument in favor of using them, even if it isn’t like the good old days.
See, I don’t think a TD-enforced loss is really an “end condition,” but rather a forced forfeit. The game isn’t really over; you’ve merely lost the privilege of playing on, along with the tournament point. I’ll grant you the adjudicated win, though.
If you make a cell phone violation loss a non-rated loss then that opens up the possibility of people protecting their ratings (in games where the expected result would cause them to lose rating points) by having somebody call them (maybe setting the ringer to silent without vibrating, having a person call every ten minutes during the game, and only turning on the ring volume when having a non-rated loss becomes desirable). A ridiculous extreme would result in a tournament with all decisive results and no games actually rated.
P.S. A lot of casual club tournaments might have no serious penalty for a cell phone violation while other clubs might take a zero-tolerance policy on cell phones going off.
I’d agree. Maybe there are other plausible scenarios in which to adjudicate - but I can think of only one other: Let’s say player is literally arrested in the middle of a game - taken away in handcuffs from the playing floor. (And that the arrest cause isn’t directly known - it isn’t for behavior at the tournament, but something more akin to a bench warrant arrest.) Interruption beyond player control?
I also agree 18G2 also doesn’t make clear whether its examples are “adjudications” or not, but I would certainly lean to “not.”
But mooning the opponent is not allowed? Maybe it would have helped me in my third and last game last night.
Two other questions this raises for me:
Section 18’s title is, “The Adjournment of the Game.” Does this mean that before a game is adjudicated per 18G, the game must first be adjourned per the rest of S18?
18C makes clear that, absent set adjournment times, the director can adjourn the game, “after the first time control.” So, one time control only means a game can’t be adjourned? (Our hypothetical example doesn’t state the time controls of the game, only that it’s 25 minutes to go on player Coronary’s clock.)
In passing, we also don’t know what round it is.
The other primary TD failures I see in the first post are:
Apparent failure of the TD who changed the result to draw to communicate same to player Non-Coronary.
[I feel like this is a Monty Python sketch. “Hello, Mrs. Coronary!” “Hello, Mrs. Non-Coronary!”]
Likewise, possible failure of TD to inform player Non-Coronary of ability to appeal the decision. (I would think at minimum the result change could be appealed to a special referee or an appeals committee.)
And I also wonder… Let’s say player Coronary later appeals on the grounds that the game should have been ruled as adjourned, and not a win on time. Does player Coronary have ground to stand on?
Second variation… Player Coronary returns to venue 5 minutes after player Non-Coronary turned in the sheet. The literal miracle happened: After 15 minutes in the ED wait (with documentation,) the Doctor diagnosed angina and discharged player in time to go back to the venue. Again, what options does M. Coronary possess?
And, come to that, let’s say the TD went ahead and adjourned and kept the game adjourned (however foolish that might be.) Is there a reason the TD cannot do that, keeping it adjourned past final round to see if both players want to complete the game after tournament and allocate prizes accordingly? (Though I wouldn’t want to have to deal with pairings in such a context, personally. ) Just a thought.
Couldn’t a sandbagger do that too? He could always play his absolute best but somehow ensure that a confederate phoned him at just the right moment to spoil his win. Then no one could accuse him of playing badly on purpose.
Do people agree that, in principle, we should try to avoid “shoe-bomber rules”* – rules written because of some way some jerk decided to exploit the system, rather than because they make the most sense for the greatest number of people?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you haven’t been in an airport this century.
I don’t agree with your general statement about shoe-bomber rules. Some are better than others, and in chess, we want to eliminate some easy and effective forms of cheating that could allow someone to get better results than they deserve. (I think they have gone way overboard in US airports, and I don’t feel any safer flying because of it. If someone wants to blow up a plane, they can probably find a way without copying various ways that weren’t even successful before.)
In trying to keep sanity while controlling chess cheating, I have to follow the rule that it’s worse to cheat to win, than to cheat to lose. It’s basically impossible to catch someone cheating to lose, because anyone can make a mistake. In fact, when I played years ago before most of the concern about sandbagging and the availability of computer assistance, I always felt that losing was an option, because a player has the right to make any move he wants. It would have been rather unsporting, but I don’t think I would have called it cheating.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion of this morality, but it does allow one deal with situations like this. Which shoe-bomber rule do we prefer? The one that prevents cheating to protect a rating that would go down. If someone is trying to lose and a cell phone call won’t do it, they will find another way.
Do not TDs have discretionary authority to deal severely with someon who starts employing the phone forfeit gambit consistently? I highly doubt such a strategy could be employed more than once or twice by the same person with the same TD or with a TD is aware the antics had been used before.
The difference is that, in tennis, a win or loss is only for that competition. To my knowledge, there is nothing in tennis equivalent to a chess rating.
I think that the fair thing to do would be to rule it to be a win on forfeit for the healthy player. The question is whether such a ruling would be consistent with the rulebook.
There are ATP rankings. And when I was in high school, a friend of mine was on the tennis team, and I think he had an Elo-type tennis rating, something like 1600. Indeed, he was a pretty good tennis player but not a future star. Maybe USTA had tennis ratings at one time.
Other sports and games also do not have in their provisions anything similar to adjudication in chess, either.
"Well, he was up 2-0 and 45-Love in the game… We can conclude that he would have won it "
"He was 2 under Par on Hole 16. Let’s just assume he continued that through 18 "
I don’t know if that comments on the archaic nature of adjudication, or defines yet another way in which chess is unique in its own right.
But I am now persuaded to think a forfeit win would be in order, if the TD had not adjourned the game at the time Mr. Coronary was carted away. (Still noting that Mr. Non-Coronary may have failed to follow procedure to claim a win on time.)
Maybe it would have helped me in my third and last game last night. 
) Just a thought.
" 