On the way to work this morning ... my latest brilliant idea

We are in the midst of running our City Championship which consists of two sections of 6 players each playing round robins (1 game a night) to determine the two players that will play for the title.

I’m using the carbon scoresheets to get copies of the games that I then go through to input into the computer to create pgn files to make a html page for our web site. (Weee)

Now obviously we are too small of a club to run out and purchase Monroi devices or DTG boards.

But

Over time we could purchase cheap palm pilots, used, even donated or whatever. It doesn’t take much to run a Chesspad like program. I even have an extra palm pilot already. Pretend we could get say old M100 palms for say $25 each and maybe work out a multiuse deal with Chesspad so that it isn’t costing $30 dollars or so for each unit, for about $600 dollars the club could have 12 chess scoring machines.

These would be set up with just the chess scoring programs on them and then the club players would be instructed on there useage.

Cheating shouldn’t be an issue because the club would be supplying them as scoresheets.

And you wouldn’t have to get all 12 at once. You could start out with 1 or 2 and just put them on the games at the higher level etc.

As the old saying goes, no system is foolproof, because fools are SO ingenious. :slight_smile:

I think that idea would work best where there is a pool of players who know each other and who trust the club administration.

What do you do when High Rated Player shows up at your event and insists he will not use your gizmo or play anyone using it?

What’s to keep Underhanded Player from doing the same thing you’ve done, but with a program that also does analysis, and swapping his unit for yours?

You are right what I’m talking about is a small pool of players who know each other.

And if a player doesn’t want to use it that would be fine. It might just take longer to get his game posted to the web.

And since they would be older palm units we would mark them with paint or something to identify them as club units.

That still wouldn’t prevent some one from making their own unit and doing a slight of hand.

The other thing I would do is use this method in using them. Palm is normally off when not in use. (Conserve batteries) So player moves, turns on palm unit, records move, turns off palm unit. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for cheating even if there is a chess unit on it.

Plus at the end of the night I would be collecting the Units to take home to get the scores. If they did the slight of hand trick to put back the original machine that machine wouldn’t have the game on it.

With this senario I don’t think I would be worried about cheating too much.

I just did a quick search and found M105s for about $25. If we had a freeware chess recording program available the concept is getting pretty cheap. (I paid $15.90 for carbon score sheets that will eventually run out.)

The main problem I forsee is that I have to keep 12 palms charged up and ready to roll.

I did a quick glance at the rulebook, and could easily have missed something, but I don’t see any precise definition of what a scoresheet is. Couldn’t this be considered a scoresheet which is provided by the organizer? I had been under the impression that an organizer could require that his scoresheets be used - though I couldn’t find that in the rulebook either, and so that might just be a “tournament legend”.

I looked around the website and found:
uschess.org/ratings/ruleschangeRule15A.pdf

I don’t know if that was approved as is or not. If it was, it does seem that a td could require that his non-standard scoresheet be used.

Not a TD, an organizer. And you are correct otherwise. If you announce it before hand.

wzim wrote:

Might a similar feature, if enabled on a Monroi, satisfy many of its critics, while crippling none of its intended functionality?

I’m thinking a screensaver that turned off the display within a couple of seconds after the move was recorded, and that would come back on automatically when the screen were “touched” to beginning recording of the next move.

The blank screen would both prevent the unit from relaying information to the player trying to decide on the next move, and make it obvious to opponents and tournament officials that the unit was not being used as a cheating device. And if the user only wanted to use if for its intended purpose of recording the moves, I don’t see what the downside of such a feature would be.

Of course, there are some critics who would point out that the unit doesn’t have to display anything to be an aid to cheating, it could transmit Morse code to the cheater’s shoe or something.