Tuesday
Mar092010
Zero Tolerance, Revisited
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 4:27PM In part to save my readers' retinas from getting blinded by the Sokolov book cover, it's time for a new post. The topic is the utterly idiotic decision by FIDE last year to forfeit players who arrive at the board even one second after the round starts (unless the organizers explicitly address and refuse the rule in the tournament regulations). There's a petition going around the European Championships to amend the rule to give up to 30 minutes' leeway before a forfeit is declared. As of this writing, there were 110 signatories to the petition, but the organizers passed the buck to ECU President Boris Kutin. We'll see what happens.
HT: supy
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Reader Comments (5)
Idiotic rule from idiotic organization.
The rule leads to an absurd situation: a player is free to spend their time as they please on any move EXCEPT move one. You are free to leave your board whenever you want to get yourself a coffee, take a stroll or look at other games and you will only suffer some loss of time, as your clock will be running. So technically, you can make your first move and then leave for an hour and 29 minutes and only then come back to play with a minute left on your clock, and it will be perfectly fine. The only move you can't do that on is move one. Where is the logic?
And hey, it was pretty funny when Hou Yifan was defaulted in last year's Chinese Championships for not actually being seated at the board: she stood by her table, filling out her scoresheet. I mean, that was just so surreal that I was hardly able to believe it was not some kind of a late April Fool's joke.
I actually thought it was a joke Wandowicz at the time. At first I asked, "did her cell phone ring?"
Why on earth would FIDE make such a decision? For one thing, it massively ups the possibility of gamesmanship:
"Hey, Dennis, before we start- there's an urgent message for you over at reception..." heh, heh, heh- 1-0 to me, I think.