The thread on the US Open and related time control issues has me wondering what the longest game was that people have had occur in events they directed.
For me, it was a 119 move game in the Nebraska State Championships in the mid 80’s, between an expert and a master. The expert had a slight edge in a rook-and-pawn ending, but refused two draw offers. He finally gave in and agreed to a draw at move 119.
This happened to be the last game in the last round, so it wasn’t impacting any subsequent rounds and most of the other players had already gone home. In fact, the master would have won the state championship even had he lost the game.
The time control was 40/90, 20/30 (no increment or delay). In an event where I expected to be home by 6PM I didn’t leave the tournament site until after 7PM.
At one of the CCA Chicago events there was a game that had gone through the base time and was continuing on delay with each clock under 20 seconds (this was prior to the rule change allowing TDs to call the 75-move rule). After well over 100 moves (maybe over 200) played on the delay (and after the other sections were already paired and about to start) one player said something on the order of “is this a draw?” which the floor chief treated as a draw claim of the fifty move rule and then upheld the claim.
I heard of another similar situation without a player making a comment where the floor chief invoked the 1,000-move-rule to declare it a draw (supposedly it was already well over 200 or 300 moves). (yes, I know such a rule is not in the rulebook but it was essentially a use of rule 1A)
I’m not sure this counts (the game wasn’t all that long in terms of time consumed), but in an unrated scholastic section, we had a game in which the players weren’t keeping score, but they were using one of the old blue Saitek clocks. I’m not familiar with the details of operation of these clocks, but the TD who was observing the game told us that the clock’s move counter had a maximum number of moves (either 100 or 200), after which it would “turn over” and start counting again from 0. When the clock turned over for the second time, the TD declared the game a draw (it had been quite a while since either player “made any progress”). I seem to remember the number 400, but I don’t know whether that was 400 total moves (i.e., 200 move pairs) or 400 moves by each player. Either way, that’s a long game!
ETA: The two longest games (by number of moves) that I’ve played were both draws: 94 moves vs. a Class B player in 2015, and 88 moves vs. an Expert in 1994. I was Class C (as I have been for most of my chess “career”) for both games. In the 2015 game, I was down an exchange and objectively losing for much of the game, but he missed several opportunities to put me away.
I have been known to talk to the players separately and ask them if they have any plan for how to win the game. If both answer ‘no’, I have been known to declare the game a draw.
If I’m thinking of the game you’re talking about, and I’m sure we are, my recollection is that it was from a non-rated, beginners section and they were using a US Chess Game Timer (provided by the New Berlin coach) that counts up to 200 moves then flips over to 1 again. After the game finished the assistant TD in that room told us that the move counter had actually flipped over two times and was up to forty-something again so the total number of moves (not move pairs) made was over 440. They were playing fast and using a 5 second delay so there wasn’t an issue of running out of time.
Yes, that is the game I was thinking of. However, move counters count move pairs, so if the move counter got up to 200 twice and then up to 40, that would be 440 move pairs, or 880 individual moves. Wow! As I said earlier, though, even if it was only 220 move pairs, that’s still a very long game. (I’m defining a “move pair” as one White move plus one Black move. The clock’s move counter would increment by one after each such move pair.)
In the 2018 National Tournament of Senior State champions I lost two games over 100 moves on the same day. I’m not normally prone to long games. Neither resulted in time scrambles, but we all used most of our time.
Fortunately this was not an event with three long games in one day. Of course I won’t play in those without taking a bye.
Isn’t that how most people define “moves”? If we’re playing a game and you move 63 times and I move 62 (your 63rd move was stalemate) we don’t claim to have played a 125 move game, right? In the “engine age” we’ve come to call a move two “ply”.
I was doing a tournament at 40/90, SD/30;+30 a few years ago, and my rounds were set for 10 and 4, which is plenty of time the vast majority of the time. On this day in round one I had am FM with the White side of a Philidor position against an A-player at about 3:30. Now this tournament is FIDE-rated, so the more “creative” solutions offered couldn’t have been attempted. The A-player may have reached the Philidor position even earlier, but at this point I was sure he had. Players had started to trickle back into the playing hall and were invariably surprised that a game was “still going on.” Around move 140 Black noticed that it was 15 minutes in to the time to start the next round and attempted active defense. He resigned on move 145. Since then I have determined to begin the adjournment process at 3:40.
That sounds remarkably similar to a game that occurred in one of our tournaments a decade or so ago. This tournament had a triple TC (40/100, 30/60, SD/30 d5) and the organizer didn’t do adjournments. The players were a master (who is now an IM; I think he was an FM at the time) and a B player. The position switched back and forth between the Philidor (with the FM on the winning side) and Lucena positions several times. We thought it was never going to end, but eventually the FM converted the Philidor position and won.
Unbelievably, this was not the longest game of that round. At the same time, we had a master and an expert with a Rook vs. Bishop endgame. The master had the Rook, and the expert had the Bishop and was down to one second on his clock. Fortunately for him, he knew how to draw that endgame and was able to make all his moves within the 5-second delay. But the master wanted him to “prove it” and wouldn’t agree to a draw. Finally, one of the TDs stood there and counted out 50 moves (neither player was keeping score) before declaring the draw.
I don’t know how many moves either of these games went, but the next round started at least an hour late.
ETA: With a red face, I must admit that I’ve just demonstrated defective “knowledge” of the Philidor and Lucena positions. Of course, the Lucena is the one that’s winnable, and it’s the one that the FM was eventually able to win. I had it backwards above. I discovered this while checking something (a problem/test for which a wrong answer is given, in my opinion) in Silman’s Complete Endgame Course. I have to periodically go back to that book and review these endings; otherwise, I forget how to handle either of them (and even which is which, apparently!).
Perhaps I will start a new thread over in “All Things Chess” (if I can figure out how to do that) to see what others think of my interpretation of the Silman problem.
I wondered the same thing. The master apparently didn’t know how to win the Lucena position (although he eventually figured it out), and the B-player didn’t know how to draw the Philidor position. I have also seen two masters play out a dead drawn King-and-pawn endgame (that I knew was a draw as soon as I looked at it) all the way to stalemate. Endgame technique ain’t what it used to be.
ETA: Keeping in mind that this happened over 10 years ago, I can’t guarantee that the exact canonical Lucena position ever appeared on the board during the game in question. However, the B-player did have a Philidor position (or one that could easily be converted to a Philidor position) several times, and kept letting it drift into a losing position; and then the master would let it drift back to the drawn position. Eventually the losing position was lost. They were probably both tired, and may have been short on time as well. It’s also highly likely that I would not have played either side of that position as well as they did. In any event, details get fuzzy as the years roll on, but your story reminded me of this remarkably similar game.
It’s hard for me to believe that a Class B player would not know how to draw from the Philidor position, and impossible for me to believe that a Master would not know how to win from Lucena. These are literally the first things you learn about rook and pawn endings. Any self respecting Class D player should know Philidor and Lucena.
I have “learned” all kinds of thing in my life (including these positions) that tend to slip out of my mind after a while if I don’t regularly use the knowledge or review it. I have played over 1000 rated chess games, and I don’t recall ever having had the Lucena position in any of those games. I’ve had a Philidor position exactly once, and lost the game because I was unable to remember how to draw it. I knew it was a drawn position, but just couldn’t remember the proper technique for securing the draw. It’s hard to retain knowledge that you never use. I’m Class C, but I have been Class B for a few brief periods in my life, and I have no trouble at all imagining a Class B player spacing out on the details of these endings if he hasn’t played them in a while. And especially so if he’s in time trouble at the end of a 6-hour game. Can you imagine a Class C player stalemating his opponent with Queen and King vs. King? I managed to do it just a few years ago in a blitz game. All kinds of crazy things can happen in time pressure.
As for the Master forgetting Lucena, I will back off on that claim. As I admitted in the post quoted above, I may be misremembering that. It probably wasn’t exactly a Lucena position. But it most assuredly was a winning Rook-and-pawn endgame that he allowed to slip back into a drawn endgame several times before finally managing to win it. Rook-and-pawn endgames are notoriously hard, even for Masters.
Perhaps, in my original account of this game, I should not have used the words “Lucena” and “Philidor”, but just stuck with “winning R&P endgame” vs. “drawn R&P endgame”. I am 100% sure that the game in question switched back and forth between the latter two several times. And this should not be at all hard to believe, regardless of the ratings of the players.
That I find extremely easy to believe. I just didn’t see how White’s king could be in front of the pawn, then Black’s king, then White’s, etc. A lot of non-trivial endgame knowledge is very poorly understood, and understood at a level that will stand up to extreme time pressure.
Well, as someone who was briefly a B player, I know there are Lucena and Philidor positions, I doubt I could have told you which was which. Now, could I play them properly? I wouldn’t count on that. I know it is important to get the king in front of the pawn, but the devil is always in the details.
I probably couldn’t navigate my way through a knight+bishop mate, either. Other than back in the days at the old Chicago Chess Club when the other Larry Evans would play that position with one minute on an old BHB clock for a quarter, I’ve only seen it occur once, and the player who had it (an expert as I recall) was able to pull it off though he took some 20 minutes to do it.
Yes, now that I’ve thought about it, I don’t see how the Kings could swap positions like that, either. I was apparently using the words Lucena and Philidor in a very loose sense to refer to general R&P endings that can drift between won positions and drawn positions (kind of like people who refer to every draw as a “stalemate”). I apologize for the misunderstanding, and for using precise words very imprecisely. The game in question may have had an actual Philidor position (or something close to it), but it almost certainly never had a Lucena position.
There was an A-player at our club back in the day who got the N+B ending in a game, and couldn’t win it. You would have to be quite strong, I think, to figure it out over the board with the clock ticking if you hadn’t studied it. Silman doesn’t cover it at all in his “Complete” endgame book. He says that he only ever had that ending once in his career, and IMs Watson and Donaldson have never had it all. Given its extreme rarity, he doesn’t consider it worth the time and effort required to learn it. I can’t argue with that. In my case, even if I did learn it, I’d undoubtedly forget how to do it within a year or two if I didn’t get in a game (or review it regularly).