A game begins. Five or six moves in, one of the players looks pale and shaky. He excuses himself, gets up from the table and leaves the room. He never returns. It is determined that he was hospitalized.
Rated or unrated? 28P is unambiguous (“a game in which both sides make moves is always rated”), but this seems like a qualitatively different situation from loss on time or violation of the rules. For tournament purposes, a forfeit win is clearly called for, but should your rating reflect your ability to outsit someone in poor health?
Yes. While its unfortunate that the player was hospitalized it is out of the control of the opponent and the TD. Additionally the hospitalized player prior to starting the game should have had some idea of their health and if they could reasonably continue. I doubt the hospitalized player will care about losing the rating points as he/she would have more important things to worry about.
28P is unambiguous, as you say. The chess rating is not a prize; an increase in rating is not a reward; and a decrease in rating is not a penalty. It is not a measure of your worth as a human being. The rating system is not really some kind of meta-tournament, in which players gain and lose “points”. A rating is just a number. It is a number which, together with some statistics and some computations, can be used to predict performance in tournament games against other players with ratings. The rating system is judged by whether those predictions are accurate, not by whether the conditions under which people gain and lose “points” are “fair”. (This is one reason why people who understand the rating system regard rating “floors” as an aberration.)
How well you play when you are on top form is one factor affecting your rating. But ratings do not merely reflect your strength when you are on top form; they reflect your overall strength, which includes how often you are not on top form, for whatever reason. The rating becomes less accurate as a predictor of performance if we exclude all the losses where our human sympathies incline us to give the player a pass or an excuse. The rating system is not your mother. It may seem harsh, but a player who has health problems, issues that regularly prey upon on his mind, or other frailties affecting performance, is less likely to win chess games than a player who does not have these issues, ceteris paribus.
The ability to sit at the board is so fundamental that we usually overlook it. But when health takes that ability away, being unable to sit at the board and complete a game is relevant to an estimate of chess playing ability. Thus, when a person forfeits for health reasons after a few moves, that counts as a loss in the rating system, the same as any other loss.
As a tournament director, I have seen many games in which one side had a
significant advantage after five or six moves. And, surely, the loosing side
felt sick about the game. I would imagine that if ratings were not effected by
such withdrawals that for a fact, tournament directors would have many more
players become, suddenly, violently, ill.
This reminds me of a game I played when I was fairly new to tournament chess, maybe 8 or 9 years ago. My opponent was over 90 years old. She was rated about 100 points above me, and I’d already lost a pawn relatively early in the game. So I was expecting to lose at that point, though it was still early enough to try and fight back.
At one point, my opponent surprised me by getting up from the board on her own move with her clock ticking. She came back a couple of minutes later with a cup of water. She then proceeded to pull a bunch of prescription medicine bottles out of her purse, and after looking them over to find the right ones (there were at least 6 or 7 bottles), she took some pills out of a couple of them and swallowed them with the water. I asked if she was ok, or if she needed help or anything, and she insisted that we keep playing. I was seriously nervous that she was about to drop dead right there at the board!
So she made her move, and we played on, and I managed to come back and win. I always felt guilty about that win, as I assumed that if she had been in better health, she would have been able to convert the win with her extra pawn. Looking back now that I’m a stronger player, she was only a 1500 level player at the time, and at that level, a pawn advantage early really doesn’t mean that much, especially since I tend to fight harder when I’m losing. So maybe I would have won even if she was perfectly healthy that day. Now you’ve got me curious to go look through my old scorebooks to find that game and see what I think of that game.
But as Mottorshead pointed out, the rating is a reflection of how well you play every time you show up to tournaments, not just on your best day. If she was concerned with losing rating points, or not being able to play her best, she could have chosen not to show up to that tournament. Something tells me she was more concerned with just having some fun playing the game than with the rating points she gave me that day.