One of the big improvements in chess equipment since the 1980s is the two extra Queens that come standard with even basic tournament sets.
See: chess.com/news/view/controv … nship-5047
A national championship in which there were no extra Queens at hand for the players during the deciding playoff blitz game. So an upside-down Rook turned out to be a Rook, not a Queen.
That is a neat little trick, holding/hiding the Queen your opponent needs for promotion. One might see this in a club or bar game, but not a national championship. In a bar game, you might get punched for hiding the Queen. Bad situation all round, for the players, arbiters, and organizers.
Why do the Canadians play on such small, cheap looking boards? The pieces barely fit in the squares. It is easy to knock the single weighted pieces over during time pressure.
No sympathy for the player whatsoever. You’re at a chess tournament. There’s an extra queen somewhere. Stop the clock, speak up, and have the arbiter find one.
The rule is a rule for a very good reason. Nonsense such as upside down rooks and sideways pawns only invites confusion and increases the possibility of piece displacement during games.
In FIDE, an upside down rook is a rook is a rook is always a rook.
In US Chess, the delegates have decided to make an upside down rook a queen. Their accommodation of the procedure does not make it correct.
Why do the Americans allow upside down rooks to be queens? It is easy to knock a single weighted piece with the weight in the wrong place over during time pressure.
In a normal situation—classical time control with full delay/increment and two extra Queens at hand, one for each side—I might also show little sympathy for an IM who did not follow the letter of FIDE rules in a FIDE-rated event. (Not sure if the playoff game was FIDE-rated but the main event was.)
However, this was a Blitz game, at G/5+3 if I read correctly. There were no Queens left on the board in the position at that time. Black’s captured Queen was in White’s non-moving hand, for whatever reason. Black had but a few seconds left on his clock. And the arbiters were standing near the board, which was the only game being contested.
For those reasons—the lack of either a captured Queen or an extra Queen being in sight for the time-frenzied player the most compelling—it’s asking a lot for that player to conform to by-the-book procedure that makes sense sitting in front of a computer screen far from the scene after-the-fact.
This might be a case in which FIDE’s hands-on approach for arbiters makes a player less likely to stop his clock as compared to US Chess-rated play. “The arbiters are right here, if anything happens they will deal with it and stop clocks if needed.”
And it boggles my mind the arbiters allowed the game to start without extra Queens next to the board. That is one of the main things I check before the start of any rated game, even a club quad in the boonies. Including extra Queens with most tournament sets was one of the best things to happen to rated chess culture since I have been around it.
No one thinks as clearly in severe time pressure and/or in Blitz as they do in normal conditions in a Classical game. Since FIDE and US Chess both rate Blitz games and they are used to decide important titles in playoffs, that is well to bear in mind.
Imagine being down to seconds left in a Blitz game with 2 or 3 seconds increment per move, in a pawn race to decide a national title, no time to calculate, about to promote a pawn…and find no Queen in sight—even though there are no Queens on the board in the current position. And with the arbiters right there to pro-actively deal with problems, the FIDE way.
Whether or not it’s grounds for a successful appeal, I feel for this guy.
It would have been good if the arbiter, upon seeing the probability of an imminent promotion and the opponent holding onto the queen, had paused the clock immediately and insisted that the opponent let go of the queen. An ounce of prevention, etc.
OTOH, arbiters, like players, can become excited in a time scramble and might not be quick enough to take a course of action that, in retrospect, obviously would have been best.
And then, of course, there is the matter of chess lawyers (including arbiters) being too intent on following the letter of the law and insufficiently willing to invoke rule 1A (or the FIDE equivalent).
Bill Smythe
Isn’t it common in other areas to fiddle with captured pieces? I know it is frequent among the players at my tournaments.
Fact is the Black player neither made sure there was a spare queen in reaching distance before the game nor made sure he knew the procedure to promote when the desired piece was unavailable. It is 100% his fault. I haven’t watched the complete video, but I assume he either resigned or was mated by a legal move. In that case it should be ruled that he lost the game and has no further possibility of appeal.
Alex Relyea
A review of the video shows a captured black bishop being held by white’s left hand (folded across his body and thus on the other side of the board from the other captures) starting at the 2:03 mark (following the first piece trade). At the 7:37 mark white puts the black bishop down with the other captured black pieces. From 7:35 to 8:19 white does not have his left arm folded across his body (the only time prior to the 14:17 mark that white’s left hand is neither folded across his body nor hidden below the table).
Immediately following the queen trade, at the 8:33 mark the black queen in white’s right hand is moved to and held in white’s left which is still folded across his body and on the other side of the board from the other captured pieces. At the 9:43 mark that hand is moved under the table still holding the queen. At the 12:29 mark (after being under the table for 2:46) it comes up again still folded across his body with the captured queen. During the next couple of minutes there are multiple touches of the right hand to the top of the queen in white’s left hand. At the 14:16 mark it is still folded across his body with black reaching for a queen. At the 14:17 mark, after black has grabbed the rook (with no more than 6 seconds on black’s clock while white had more than 30 seconds), the left hand unfolds and places the queen with the captured black pieces while reaching with the right hand for the visible and previously captured white queen so that the a-pawn can promote. The black queen had been palmed and out of sight for 5 minutes and 44 seconds, or 10 seconds longer than the bishop had been palmed and out of sight.
Black protested and was denied, eventually resigning 14 moves later.
Perhaps white didn’t deliberately hide the queen, but it certainly does seem like he did. That queen suddenly mysteriously appears in the captured piece pile right after the upside down rook is on the board.
Ideally the arbiter would’ve have noticed that their was no queen visible and corrected the situation ahead of time, but otherwise it seems that the arbiter handled this correctly. Black really didn’t give the arbiter much chance to intervene. It was a very quick scan for the quick and the a grab for the rook and just that quickly it was on the board.
If black had made any indication that he couldn’t find a queen, then I’m sure the arbiter would’ve treated the clock as stopped and dealt it with appropriately.
If you have ever attended a FIDE arbiter seminar taught by a good FIDE Arbiter teacher you will have been told that a FIDE arbiter should a set of extra pieces at hand to deal with any promotion of a pawn. That is Queen promotion and under-promotion [Bishop, Knight, or Rook], and thus avoid any question of exactly what a pawn promotes to. It would also avoid any delay in the actual promotion of a pawn.
Larry S. Cohen
attendee at 2011 Arbiter Seminar at Canadian Open in Toronto
My point precisely. The extra Queens should be within grasping distance of the players, as has become common at US Chess rated events.
That way players are covered for pawn promotion even if the promoting player’s Queen is still on the board. Also if the Queen has been captured but is not within sight and grasping distance—whether it fell off the table, fell over and is hidden by the clock, the opponent has it in his non-moving hand for whatever reason, etc.—the player is covered then, too.
The combination of the arbiters not placing extra Queens at the board before the start of the game and White effectively hiding Black’s captured Queen makes me think Black got a tough break and deserves sympathy rather than the “tough; learn the rules next time” he got in some comments in this thread.
Not sure it’s enough to win an appeal, but the player who cradled the Queen and the arbiters who did not provide extra Queens need to learn proper procedure/etiquette at least as much as does the loser of this game.
Has this really become common at US Chess rated events?
The only reason I have any sympathy at all for Mr. Mark’s position is that the game was a high stakes game and the arbiters should have been better prepared. The onus is still on the player to follow the rules regardless of the playing conditions.
Alex Relyea
Many of the Club Special-type sets sold by US Chess (and others) now contain an extra white queen and an extra black queen. If an organizer furnishes sets, and at least some of these are of recent purchase, there will be quite a few extra queens scattered around the tournament room, probably within reach of just about every table, but perhaps not AT each table.
Bill Smythe
I am willing to concede that it is good arbiter practice to have extra pieces at hand, and that White was handling the queen.
That doesn’t make Black’s remedy an upside down rook. It makes Black’s remedy stopping the clock and saying something along the lines of “Unhand the queen!”
There is ample justification, grounded in fairness and lack of confusion, for prohibiting the use of overturned or sideways pieces as substitutes for other pieces. Even with the circumstances, I still have no sympathy for Black here.
I have a problem with white benefiting from cheating. YMMV. It doesn’t matter if it was intentional, his actions put black at a disadvantage.
White was only cheating if it says somewhere that players are not to fiddle with captured pieces. There is plenty of fault to be spread around here, but none should land on White.
Alex Relyea
Hiding a piece that is in fact part of the game ought to be cheating if it isn’t in the rules. It is at least unethical, and he was rewarded for it. He deserves zero respect.
Nobody here acquitted themselves well. White should not have been handling the captured Queen. The fact that fiddling with captured pieces is common does not excuse it here, and if he did want to fiddle with a piece, he could have grabbed a captured pawn.
The arbiters failed to live up to high professional standards. They should have envisioned the possibility of piece promotion, and had extra pieces at the ready. They should also not have let White hide Black’s Queen.
All this being the case, however, the onus is still on Black to take action for himself. He apparently didn’t know that under FIDE rules, as my friend Brennan Price so aptly puts it, an upside down rook is a rook is a rook is always a rook. That’s on him. He could, and should have stopped the clock and demanded that his opponent unhand his Queen, or that the Arbiters get him a new one. He was not helped by a quasi-ethical opponent, or by less than astute actions from the Arbiters, but it also has to be said that he was his own worst enemy here. I have sympathy for him, but I would not uphold a protest from him.
I wouldn’t uphold a protest either. Once the game is over it is over.