I checked out the MonRoi PCM at the company Web site and now I officially feel like a dinosaur at the age of 42. Why the heck should something like this be approved for use as a “scoresheet” in a rated chess game?
Is MonRoi a corporate sponsor of the U.S. Open and did the company pay for the ad-disguised as an article on the back of the recent Executive News?
I hate to be cynical but this smells like money driving a rule change that will eventually trickle down and affect players who do not have the cash or the interest to have anything to do with such a device.
The comparison to time-delay clocks is poor. Time delay brought a measure of sanity to the chaos of Sudden Death finishes and eliminated the need for ILC claims, which are imperfect by definition and worse in practice.
Time-delay digital clocks are an example of technology answering an urgent need of the marketplace: the need for a sane way to end SD games.
The MonRoi may work like a charm and be tamper-proof, but it’s aimed at a select market and the rules are about to be changed to accommodate the few who would buy such a device.
Please note that I always make my move first, then record it, unless it’s an absolutely forced series of Queen capture/recapture or the like.
Will there br special rules for a MonRoi during the last 5 minutes of a SD time control, when players using paper scoresheets can stop keeping score?
The many good benefits foreseeable from MonRoi devices have been listed in recent posts, so to avoid rehash I will restate just a subset.
Imagine your are the editor for your state’s monthly chess magazine. Think about how long it takes you to by-hand enter all the games you want to publish for the month. This includes deciphering semi-legible mistake laden scoresheets, and entering them move-by-move into the computer. Of course, you do not know whether the game is publish worthy until you enter it and see. So you have to enter a lot more games than you publish. Lots of work.
Or instead, as players finish their games, you automatically have their games captured. With a few keystrokes you can copy all of the tournament’s games as .PGN files to the state chess website. This way people who want to see how their fellow competitors played can get that info easily and immediately.
Or look at it in the abstract. All around you are the obvious benefits of digitizing information. That principle is overwhelmingly proven. Your music CDs, your bank statements, baseball statistics in the Sunday paper, this forum you are reading.
Instant and automatic digitization of chess gamescores is a natural - heck chess is a ‘digital’ sport (I dislike the term ‘mind’ sport). It matters not whether you place your knight in the center of square f3 or sloppily hanging over the edge, each is exactly the same move).
If MonRoi is a dumb idea, then so is the whole DGT auto-sensory board.
But most of us agree the price needs to drop a lot before we would buy. So I thank those few early adopters who begin that cycle toward lower prices thru higher sales volumes and economies of scale.
I have a monroi for my 6 year old son. He records games with it when he didn’t before. I can now help him improve from all his tournament games. Before, sometimes I wonder how he won or lost since parents can’t watch kids play in most tournaments.
I remember people paying $250 for the Bowmar Brain calculator in 1971, and it couldn’t do much more than add, subtract, multiply and divide 8 digit numbers.
The early innovators always get stuck with the high prices.
Competitive chess is a sport like any other. I believe children in tournaments should all use very similar equipment. Visualize a bunch of kids in a tournament all keeping score with paper except for one who marches in with a MonRoi. That device would have an intimidation value of an extra pawn or two. At the local elementary level, I (a Senior TD) will not allow MonRoi in my tournaments until such time as they are available to almost anyone who wants one.
Typical. Another class envy argument. And by the way it is available to anyone who wants one. They just have to pay for it. Sort of like better health care. Oh, that’s right you wouldn’t know, you’re in Canada.
You have my sympathy. For both of your conditions.
Do you know how many junior golfers are in the USGA? Have you seen the costs of the top of the line junior golf sets, bags, shoes? A MonRoi pales in comparison.
I like the Monroi concept and have been an advocate of electronic scoresheets in other threads. As Eric mark points out, the big problem Monroi has is the price tag. This is going to hurt their market penetration during the most opportune time, before Excalibur or someone else comes along with a reasonably priced one. Then, even if Monroi drops its price, I’ll probably buy from the competitor that will have demonstrated a more sincere interest in my needs and has a comparable product.
Also being a Senior TD, I direct nearly all of the 120+ player scholastic events in Oklahoma (many now over 200 players) and a fraction of the open tournaments for all ages. If any kid (or probably more precisely, any parent) makes an investment in a Monroi, I believe they should be allowed to use this device as allowed for in the USCF rules (no different than when a beginner whips out a high dollar Chronos touch clock in a big K-4 section where clocks aren’t on most of the boards). If the player is in one of the top rated sections, they would be asked to send me all of their games for publication.
As the Editor of the Oklahoma Chess Bulletin state chapter publication and Oklahoma Chess Association website, collecting games for publication is always of interest. Usually after a tournament it takes days at best, and sometimes weeks, to get the available games online at okschess.org would be an added plus. Alas, the current cost of the Monroi system is likely to keep any of this from happening near term.
I’ve suggested to Excalibur that they come out with a system to compete with Monroi and offered to be a beta tester. Hopefully others will contact them with this suggestion too. If Monroi quickly comes to their senses on the price and makes it unnecessary for me to promote competition, I could still become a customer. It’s really up to them how much of the market they ultimately have.
Monsoon, thanks for your last post. Believe me, Canadian medical care is not at all what it’s cracked up to be. In many cases, utterly pathetic, but I won’t bore you with details, except to say that people die waiting for surgeries obtainable immediately in the States. (By the way, I’m an American.)
I am not opposed to MonRoi. I might buy one for myself when the price is right. I wouldn’t even object to its use in serious scholastic championships, as experienced opponents would not likely be intimidated.
I just think it’s out of place in small events involving young children for one player to be perceived as particularly special because he’s using a $400 machine to keep score instead of a piece of paper. In my events we supply the boards, pieces, and clocks. The playing field is level except for what’s inside the head.
Now I don’t know anything about golf, but I imagine expensive clubs, shoes, etc., look pretty much like their less expensive cousins. MonRoi does not look like a piece of paper.
It’s been nice chatting. This will be my last post on the subject.
A young player with a $30 analog clock is going to psych out some of his young opponents who isn’t used to having a clock on his games at all. If the clock is a fancy digital one, then even more so.
I’ve seen an ADULT get intimidated because his pre-teen opponent had a delay mode clock, because he’d never been in a game with one. He watched the delay timer tick down 5 seconds on nearly every mode, and IMHO blundered away a draw as a direct consequence.
I’ve seen a young player be intimidated because his opponent insisted they play on a $100 nicely weighted Staunton chess set in a tournament where most of the kids were playing with crummy $5 sets.
I haven’t had a player show up at an event of mine with a MonRoi yet, but I don’t see it being any more significant than any of the above factors, all of which are perfectly permissable under the rules.
The point is that if a player shows up with a MonRoi PCM you MUST let him use it, unless its use has been specifically barred in all advance publicity, announced on site, etc. At least theoretically. (And assuming the Delegates approve the suggested 15A rule change this weekend.)
I’m sure exceptios could be made for primary-age scholastic events, where all sorts of de facto rules are in force, or so I’ve been told. Then again, we’ve heard from at least two parents of very young players that they have gotten or will get a MonRoi for their child…
I guarantee this will be a mess for the next year or two if not longer. Players will show up insisting on the use of these devices and TDs won’t even know they are USCF-approved “scoresheets.” Opponents won’t have a clue and will think they are being cheated.
It will be kinda fun to watch, but only up to a point.
At the local elementary level you can probably get away with this, but I doubt TDs at other levels could. The players (and parents) who spend big cash for one of these things are likely to be the type to insist on their rights.
I’m sure TDs and organizers could prohibit MonRoi PCM’s by so noting in the TLA, all advance publicity and announcing/posting at the site—you can do almost anything but eliminate touch move with enough advance notice in ‘big letters’—but that would lead to hard feelings or even dropouts from players who don’t get to use their favorite toy.
So how is this device being marketed in Quebec? I figure since that’s the company’s home base, they might be testing the waters with local players and events.
Getting off-topic, do you have problems with players keeping score in both French and English?
Being from Montreal, and having seen the product demoed at a few tournaments, I can make some comments.
The Monroi was used by about 20 players (each was “registered” with the player’s name, and was non-transferable) at the recent Quebec Open. Unless both players had one, one would be keeping score the old-fashioned way on paper. Close to half the players using the device used paper scoresheets as well - either to record moves or simply to check off the moves as they made them (there was confusion about the move number which appears on the device - it is the move number TO BE MADE (i.e. it displays “40” when it is Black to play his 40th move)).
Use of the device allowed 6 games to be projected simultaneously (in real time) onto a screen in another room.
It is currently being used in a category 15 tournament taking place in Montreal now - as well as in the US Open.
Re: marketing - I guess a company rep would be the best to comment on this. The 20 devices were on loan to the tournament organizers at no cost (plus free on-site support rep) - but I think they had to pay for the “hub” (about $500) and possibly buy a couple of the devices. I don’t know of any individual who has bought one.
Re: French and English scorekeeping: Montreal players keep score in the language of their choice - quite often Russian (thankfully, I don’t see any more French descriptive notation - there is one player however who uses Portugese descriptive. Example of a Muzio Gambit in FDN: 1. P4R P4R 2. P4FR PxP 3. C3FR P4CR 4. F4FD P5C 5. 0-0 PxC)
Interesting. I mentioned French notation because we had a minor blow-up at our club when a player sealed a move (that right there shows why I shake my head at things like MonRoi PCM) in which he moved a knight from the e-file to the c-file.
For N, he wrote something like Cc, so the move on the scoresheet looked like Cc-c5. His opponent, showing true sportsmanship, claimed the guy was cheating and really meant to move the N to the g-file.
I’m glad to hear that players who use the MonRoi also use paper scoresheets. That’s kind of my point. I don’t object to the use of a Monroi-type device to transmit games to the mothership or the monster MonRoi database or whatever, but I do not like the idea of using it as a scoresheet.
For games at top-level events or the top boards at large opens or scholastic championships, a staff member can transmit the games, as already happens. Amateur players who want to send their game scores into the MonRoi melange can do so after the game, by referring to their scoresheet and/or from memory.
Extreme time pressure moves won’t be recorded on a MonRoi any easier than on a paper scoresheet, while very young players who cannot yet confidently keep score are not ready to play rated chess.
A scoresheet is a scoresheet. Devices that show positions and transmit game scores are fine…but they are not scoresheets.
MonRoi is a labor saving device. The restrictions and allow usages stated in the quote above degrade the entire idea into something that causes more labor.
Thanks.
I see a bright future for MonRoi, if the price ever drops.
