Amazingly, two controversies in the chess world erupted in one day having to do with the same issue: forfeiting a player for writing things on his scoresheet that he shouldn’t.
Warning: All my reporting here is based on second-hand information. If there are any people who have first-hand information about either of these episodes, please tell us!
Incident 1: In the U.S. Championship yesterday, Wesley So was forfeited in his game against Varuzhan Akobian for writing notes on his scoresheet. Note-taking during games is strictly forbidden, of course. The accounts I’ve read said that So was warned twice before by the arbiter, although they didn’t say whether the warnings were in this game or previous games. It’s a little bit hard to believe he could have been warned twice in this game, since the game lasted only 6 moves. The notes merely said something like “Double-check and triple-check your moves.”
Incident 2: In the Aeroflot Open “B” tournament in Moscow, master Pavel Dvalishvili was forfeited (in a winning position against Orkhan Abdulov) for writing his moves down before he played them. Again, it appears that he received several warnings, or at least Abdulov complained to the arbiters several times, before the punishment was meted out.
The first incident has stirred up a big controversy on Facebook; the second one is not as widely known yet in the English-speaking chess world. Both of them happened just yesterday.
Just among my small circle of Facebook friends, it seems as if the majority think that the arbiter overreacted by forfeiting So. There are other options available to the arbiter to “wake up” the player to the seriousness of the infraction — for example, imposing a time penalty. Most of the commenters felt that jumping straight from verbal warnings to forfeiting the game was excessively harsh. Some people went so far as to claim that the arbiter, Tony Rich, was incompetent. On the other hand, one of my Facebook friends, Mike Zaloznyy, has stuck up for a strict interpretation of the rules and said that it is So’s fault for not paying attention to the arbiter. (BTW, Zaloznyy is also the one who brought my attention to the second incident.)
I think that the accusation of “TD incompetence” is pretty well shot down by the second incident, because at the Aeroflot Open the arbiter was Geurt Gijssen, perhaps the most famous chess arbiter in the world. And he reacted just the same way that Rich did, going from verbal warnings to forfeiting the game. Nevertheless, the writer of the article I’m getting the information from (Dmitry Kryakvin) felt that the penalty was shocking and he lamented the profusion of harsh rules that many players may not even know about (the “zero tolerance” rule for late arrivals being a particularly egregious example). To which I would say yes, but… If he got two warnings…
So how do you feel about these two incidents? Is forfeiting the game an appropriate penalty? In So’s case, does it matter that the notes were not moves but words? Does it matter whether they are written before the game or during the game? I actually have a personal reason for asking. Before every game, on my scoresheet I underline the move where the time control is (say, move 40) and in the margin, I write my time targets for moves 10, 20, and 30. Are these illegal notes? Another thing I have occasionally done (including twice at my most recent tournament) is to write “JDI” in the margin. This stands for “Just Do It” and it’s supposed to remind me not to waste time gathering courage to play a risky move: “Just Do It!” Is this an illegal note? I have wondered this many times, but I felt that as long as I wrote it on the scoresheet before the game I couldn’t get in trouble for it.
If this is cheating, what if “JDI” were the initials of some departed friend or family member, and I was playing the game in their memory? Would that be cheating?
In the second incident, I was quite surprised to hear that it’s no longer legal in FIDE tournaments to write down your move before making it. Kryakvin’s article points out that former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik actually recommended this for his students to slow them down and keep them from making impulsive mistakes. I don’t have any dog in this fight, because I don’t do it this way. However, I did once try Botvinnik’s method and I hated it. I found it so distracting to remember to write the move down first that it actually interfered with my thinking.
Jerry Weikel, who directed the Reno tournament that I just played in, has a few idiosyncratic non-FIDE rules for his tournaments. He announces them before round one. In particular he says that writing moves down before making them is okay if you are doing it on a conventional scoresheet, but not if you are using a MonRoi device. To me, that makes very good sense because entering the move on the MonRoi actually lets you see the position after you make that move. I don’t know why it is, but there is a huge difference between having to see it in your “mind’s eye” and actually seeing it with your physical eyes. The blunder I wrote about in my last post was a classic example, where after making the move I instantly saw what was wrong with it.
Anyway, under FIDE rules Botvinnik’s method has been illegal since about 2005.
I tend to be a stickler for following the rules, but being a stickler is not really fair when the rules are vague or people don’t know them. In these gray zones, I think that a verbal warning is a very reasonable idea. But I think that a second verbal warning may be interpreted by the player as a sign of weakness — that this rule doesn’t really matter. So from the psychological point of view, I think that the arbiter should start imposing penalties on the second infraction. The second time can be a time penalty (to show the player, “Look, I’m serious”) and then the third time it should be a forfeit.
P.S. Although it’s a completely separate issue, several people have posted links to this newspaper article on Facebook. Apparently So has been harassed by his estranged family during this tournament. And they have been aided and abetted by Paul Truong … a name that should be quite familiar to USCF members who know the whole long story of his (and Susan Polgar’s) being banned from the US Chess Federation. Very sad to see So getting mixed up with those guys.
