I’m preparing a lesson on touch move for my scholastic team, and I remember hearing about an illegal pawn move on a top board at one of the recent National Scholastics that cost a top player a queen and a game in a fairly early round–does anyone remember this, and if so, can you point me to the position and what happened?
(Tomorrow’s lesson is touch move and hanging pieces–planning to include in the second part a game in which I hung a rook in a pretty strong position against Rochelle Ballantyne at the New Yorker Open, and Stripunsky-Onischuk from this year’s US Championship. Have to impress on them that everyone has to be careful to not make these dumb mistakes, even grandmasters!)
Touch move is important, but it’s a great opportunity to talk about sportsmanship as well. Here is the Unzicker-Fischer game where Fischer inadvertently touches his h pawn, only to realize that h6 is a blunder. Unzicker-Fischer
Another Fischer story where he follows the rule on his own, without arbiter interference. Wikipedia Touch Move
I don’t know that story, but here’s one I used for years in the classroom.
In the first Cornhusker State Games (about 28 years ago) there was a player in the Junior Division who was up a rook in the late middlegame, though there were a lot of tactical shots on both sides of the board. This was the last round, and a victory would have given him the Gold medal.
At one point he was placed in check. He picked up his king to move it, and then realized that the only square it could move to would result in checkmate in 1. (There was another move that would have blocked the check and strengthened his position.)
He looked up at me (I was the assistant TD for that section and was watching the game as it was one of the last ones still going) and asked “Is this touch move?” My response was “What do you think?”
He looked down sadly, moved his king, got checkmated, and wound up missing a Bronze medal on tiebreaks.
That infamous illegal pawn move involved an illegal en-passant capture and occurred a few years ago at the National High School Championship in Atlanta, GA. I remember the player that had black in this game, and it was actually white that committed the illegal en passant capture while having his queen en-prise. I remember the queen was on g4, and pawn to g6 was played by white, and black responded f5 and then white mistakenly played g:f7+ e.p. which of course was illegal.
My recollection was that white was forced to play g:h7 and of course f:g4 winning the queen and white resigned, only to have it overruled for some reason that I don’t recall.
I am very sure this is the incident you are looking for specifically.