Ever have this happen before?

Running Chess Tournaments
1

During a recent scholastic tournament:

2 junior high school players are in the endgame: K + P against K + R. Black has a pawn on e2 and a King on f2; white has a rook on the 6th rank with a King out of position to help. Both players have about 40 minutes left on their clock. Both players have stopped taking notation.

The game is going back and forth with white checking on the F file, black moving to e3, white checking on the E file, and black moving back to f2.

Black calls me over and says that he wants a draw based on triple repetition. I first ask his opponent if he wants a draw. He says no. I tell black that since there is more than 5 minutes remaining on his clock, that I cannot award him the draw without him showing me a scoresheet that can demonstrate the position occuring 3 times. He asks me if there is any other way that I can call the game a draw, and I tell him that I can also call it a draw with 50 moves without a pawn move or capture, but yet again since he has more than 5 minutes on his clock, he would need to resume keeping notation to make that claim.

I am expecting black to start taking notation, but instead he just keeps moving his king back and forth.

Now the really weird part… A few minutes later white calls me over, to complain that black has gotten up to look at other games. I tell him that since black still has 38 minutes left on his clock he can do whatever he wants with it as long as he doesn’t leave the playing hall for over 15 minutes. White then asks me if I can declare the game a draw. ?!? I ask white if he wants me to declare a draw, why doesn’t he accept black’s offer of a draw? His response is that since he doesn’t have to accept the draw, he doesn’t want to; however, since no progress is being made, he wouldn’t mind a draw being enforced by me.

I declined to intervene and ‘declare’ a draw, and the players continued to watch other games and occasionally move back and forth for 15 more minutes before white offered black a draw which black accepted.

Would anyone have intervened and declared the draw, and if so, what rule would you have used as justification? My intention was going to be to declare a draw as soon as someone’s clock got below 5 minutes, based on 14C8. 14C9 seemed to clearly preclude my intervening any earlier.

2

Moderator Mode: Off

I think you handled this perfectly.

The game is between the players, so your not intervening was the right thing to do.

Not keeping score does take away the person’s opportunity to claim the draw on the three fold repetition and 50 move rule, as long as both players have more than 5 minutes on their clocks.

You also informed the players of their rights and their opponent’s rights very well.

I say you did a great job.

3

I’d have included an admonition that both players are required to record their games when neither is in time trouble, as per Rule 15A. (In a scholastic tournament last weekend, a player in a 1200-1600 division in a K+3 connected pawns vs. K+B endgame asked if he and his opponent could agree to stop recording. I told them they had to keep recording, and their coaches would thank me.) Otherwise, since games were continuing and the players were only wasting their own time through their mutual refusal to record or agree a draw, I’d let them waste their time as you did.

4

No, I think you handled it correctly. Besides, since you allowed the game to proceed, you were able to post what happened here, and this part definitely gave me my first good laugh of the day:

“I ask white if he wants me to declare a draw, why doesn’t he accept black’s offer of a draw? His response is that since he doesn’t have to accept the draw, he doesn’t want to; however, since no progress is being made, he wouldn’t mind a draw being enforced by me.”

Bob