No, because again, you cannot force people to exercise skills they do not possess. Besides, as long as my own scoresheet is complete, correct, and legible (and I take pains to make it so), deficiencies in my opponent’s scoresheet can only harm him, not me – so I’m relatively unconcerned about that. But if we’re going to communicate moves to each other by writing them on a board – well, that simply won’t work if said moves are not legible. And since you can’t force them to be legible, this is not a good method.
On the contrary, the clock would be the easiest part of the setup to achieve, with some relatively minor technology upgrades.
A clock could have four faces, two in each of two housings. It would look a lot like two separate clocks, separated by a connecting cable about six feet long. Let’s call the clock faces A and B in one housing, and C and D in the other, in alphabetical order A-B-C-D. Each housing, though, would have only one button. When one player presses the button on his housing, it would stop clock faces A and C, and start B and D. When the opponent presses, it would stop faces D and B, and start C and A. That way each player would have an exact image of both sides of the clock at all times.
That clock is way too “busy”. There is no clock like that on the market. It would end up being a one of a kind that only an engineer would love. Too many cables. When OTB comes back, we are going to need simpler setups that meet the safety needs of the players. The lower the tech and expense, the better, for players, TDs, and organizers that feel they need to provide all of the equipment. Any tech must be user friendly and at a price point that sells.
Wifi instead of cables? Probably still too high tech (and with the new headache of keeping that pair of clocks from getting mixed up with other pairs). I like the concept, though.
Kevin Bachler has a post over in the other related thread (under Chess Issues) about Covid-19 protocol for tournaments he is planning to run in the near future. It will be very interesting to see how that works out. In particular, if enough people attend those tournaments to make them financially viable, maybe OTB chess does have a future.
Besides being simple, solutions need to be affordable. Given the large number of vaccines in development, there are reasonable odds that in 12-24 months at least one effective vaccine will be found, even if it must be boosted once or twice a year. So, there is a reasonable chance that in 18-36 months, things could return to close to what they were before.
Why would anyone invest large sums of money on chess solutions that have a high probability of only a short repayment period?
I can’t remember if I posted this earlier or not, but something I thought about…
Require both sides to bring a standard and uniform set of pieces (or purchase one onsite). The player sets up their color on their side of the board, and that player only ever touches pieces of their own color. If a capture occurs, the capturing player announces the move and the opponent must remove his or her piece from the board and then the capturing player places his or her piece on the square. Announcing a capture is equivalent to having touched the captured piece.
That will certainly cause snafus in time trouble, and still leaves open a minor question of piece-board contact. (My pieces touch your contaminated board and now that piece is actually contaminated).
I prefer the idea of two boards back-to-back (rank 8 to rank 1), that are kept in parallel by each player. Player 1 makes moves on board 1, player 2 makes moves on board 2. That way no player ever touches the pieces touched by the other player during that game, and having two boards back to back helps on maintaining a proper social distance.
The clock might be the biggest problem, especially for smaller players or those with short arms.
If they get out of sync, that’ll present challenges of its own.
You are suggesting this as a joke, right? Sometimes I can’t tell when someone is not being serious.
If you start with a clean set, surely the simplest procedure is to require both players to use hand sanitizer at the board, before the game starts. A player who is absent from the board would also be required to use the sanitizer upon his return. Each player would always know the other had clean hands, because they would see the sanitizer used.
No, I was being quite serious. If both players are well masked and refrain from touching their masks, and both players sanitize hands, and the pieces are sanitized before that game begins then one likely has the best possible environment.
But a player like me who has a habit of reaching for moustache when thinking deeply (and may end up touching mask), or a player who thinks that he can expose his nose because the mask is too hot and it’s just the nose, or doesn’t do a thorough job at hand sanitization (which means leaving them wet with alcohol for 30 seconds if one is truly doing a serious job… how often does that happen?) all open up routes of potential contamination. I’d never assume that procedures put in place will work perfectly, and I’d rather have extra layers involved if possible.
Ensuring that a player never touches anything at table but the player’s own pieces and scoresheet that the player takes away at end of game reduces the possibility of contact transmission. Contact transmission is somewhat, but not well, understood in COVID the last time I reviewed information on it.
Does that mean organizers should do that? No, not necessarily. But it is an idea for consideration. And for organizers who are used to providing sets and boards, perhaps consideration should be made to equipping players with their own piece sets they will use throughout the tournament. (Especially if said organizer will be running half the number of boards because of increased social distancing norms.) That might be cheaper than sneeze guards, too, if organizer already has equipment.
