The proposals so far (as well as the current rules) all fail to acknowledge that there are several ways to physically carry out a promotion:
First place the queen (or other piece) on the eighth rank, then remove the pawn from the seventh.
Do it the other way around – first remove the pawn from the seventh, then place the new piece on the eighth.
The complicated way – push the pawn to the eighth, then remove it from the board and replace it with the new piece.
A still more complicated way – push the pawn to the eighth, then “capture” it with a piece from off the board by displacing the pawn with the piece.
The present rule seems to endorse mainly method 3. Yet, the majority of tournament players (in my experience, at least) use method 1.
Any new rule should give its full blessing to all four methods – and should describe, for each, when the move is determined, and what options remain during the intermediate stages after a move has begun but before it is determined.
For example, for method 1, the rule could be that, as soon as a player has (deliberately) caused a piece off the board to touch a square on the eighth rank, he must promote to that piece on that square if legal.
Let’s think through the whole promotion process, including the various commonly used methods.
Bill, you forgot all the various options when the promotion involves a capture. There is the big question of how the opponent piece gets removed from the board. Should we expand the rules to cover all possible orders of: (1) remove pawn; (2) remove opponent piece; (3) place queen?
Seriously, I don’t think the current rules endorse or rule out any of your possibilities. 9D states that there are two elements to determine the promotion move: (1) removing the pawn; (2) placing and releasing a piece on the promotion square. Both of these must occur for the promotion move to be determined. These are presented in the order I have given, but there is no requirement that the two elements occur in that order. Note that there is no requirement to move the pawn onto the queening square, only to remove it, though moving the pawn onto the queening square is not ruled out.
Since the elements can be done in either order, all four of your styles are valid under the rules. Depending on the order, the intermediate stage may be:
(1) the pawn removed from the board; the queening square empty waiting for a queen.
(2) the pawn sitting on the queening square; not yet replaced by the queen.
(3) the pawn on the seventh-rank square, not yet removed; and the queen on the eighth-rank square.
All of these are legal.
9D does state that the player’s “hand” has to “release” the piece on the queening square. This means you can’t use your teeth or your toes, or any other part of your anatomy. You can’t teleport the queen onto the square by matter transport. If you use an implement or tool to do it, that is probably against the rules, except possibly if it is a “hand” tool. And it has to be the “player’s hand”, not anybody else’s hand.
So the rule is not totally an anything-goes rule, when it comes to getting the queen onto the square. Do we need to modify the rules to admit any of these possibilities? I doubt many chess players are currently using their toes, but you never know what chess players are liable to start doing and maybe we could be proactive on this one.
And now I am demonstrating a touch of typical chess tournament director CDO (OCD in the proper alphabetical order).
A literal interpretation of 8F6 seems to say that the pawn should first be pushed to the eighth, then exchanged for a queen (or other piece).
But, since hardly anybody actually does it this way, somewhere it should be explicitly stated that it is also OK to first place the queen on the eighth, then remove the pawn from the seventh. Determination should be defined as having occurred when the queen has been placed and the pawn removed (in either order).
Don’t forget, a few weeks ago there was a post (somewhere in these forums) where a player promoted by first placing the queen, then removing the pawn, and his opponent objected. Incredibly, the TD agreed with the opponent’s objection and penalized the player. That’s the sort of nonsense I’d like to put an end to, with a good wording change.
As for capture-promotions, determination should be defined as having occurred when the queen has been placed and the pawn removed and the captured piece removed (in any order). That’s simple enough.
Since the movement rules refer to “crossing” squares, a literal interpretation of those rules would require that ordinary moves be implemented by sliding the piece along each square of its diagonal, rank, or file, stopping finally in the destination square – rather than just picking it up and moving helicopter-like to the target square. Except for the knight move, or the rook part of castling, where helicopter movements are OK.
But I don’t think we need to take the description of the move rules so literally that we must read them as descriptions of how the moves are to be determined on the board. Indeed, we have Rule 9 which spells out precisely what is required to determine a move. Pushing the pawn from the seventh to the eighth rank is not required for determination of a promotion move, any more than than sliding a piece along a line is required for a regular move.
And I don’t think we need to gum up the rules with a lot of verbiage to prevent whatever bizarre interpretations TD’s come up with, unless it happens so often that we have to conclude that the rule is not clear.
All ADMS creating rules changes will be discussed in the Rules workshop, voted on to create a pro or con reccomendation, and presented to the floor.
Rules doesn’t seem to be too active in discussing rule changes prior to the meeting, just appeals to the Rules committee.
Keep in mind that, unique to pawn promotion, there are two decisions to be determined. The first is the choice of promotion square (that is, whether the pawn reaches the eighth rank by moving or by capturing). The second is the choice of promotion piece. If one follows the literal interpretation of rule 8F6, these determinations happen at different points in the process.
I would hope that revised wording would be clear about both decision points.
I think changing 8F6 and possibly 9D to account for the various ways of promoting a pawn which don’t involve physically moving the pawn to the promotion square is a good idea, but I’ll leave it to someone else to propose that ADM.
Rather than changing rule 9D to deal with the situation where a player announces the promotion piece but doesn’t replace the pawn with the new piece before pressing the clock, I’m going to modify my proposed ADM changing rule 8F7 to make it clear that if the player announces the promotion piece, either player may replace the pawn with the new piece. That way the rule will still be that the move isn’t determined until the new piece has been placed on the promotion square and the player’s hand has left the piece. All the announcement will do is to give the opponent permission to replace the piece.
As long as you’re leading the charge on this, you should add worthwhile changes to your own ADMs. Some posters (such as myself) would prefer that these things be funneled first through the rules committee. Presenting them directly to the delegates as ADMs seems backwards to me. The delegates will probably agree, and refer everything to the rules committee.
Things may happen faster (i.e. this August instead of next August) if the rules committee gets ahold of these suggestions first, and presents them at this year’s delegates meetings.
But, having said that, I like the idea of presenting these proposed ADMs in these forums. It may result in faster action by the rules committee.
I’d be happy if the rules committee took a look at my proposals before the delegates meeting, especially if they endorsed some of them. Otherwise you may be right that the delegates will simply refer the ADMs to the rules committee, delaying any action on them until 2012. Unfortunately Mike Atkins is probably right that the rules committee is unlikely to look at the proposals before the meeting. They can at least be debated at the Rules Workshop.
Here is my revised proposal for Rule 9D. Rather than dealing with the issue of a player announcing what the new piece will be but not physically replacing the pawn with the piece, this proposal addresses the situation where the player has placed the new piece on the board but has not yet removed the pawn. I might combine this and my proposed change to Rule 8F6 into a single ADM.
In Rule 9D, after “If the player has released the pawn on the last rank, the move is not yet determined, but the player no longer has the right to play the pawn to another square.” add:
If the pawn is still on the board when the player’s hand has released the new piece on the promotion square, the move has not yet been determined but the player cannot promote to a different piece or on a different square.
This might appear nonsensical: the move has not yet been determined but you can’t make a different one. Huh?
The fact that the move isn’t determined until the pawn has been removed from the board is consistent with the current version of Rule 9D: “the move is determined with no possibility of change when the pawn has been removed from the chessboard and the player’s hand has released the new appropriate piece on the promotion square.” This is significant in a situation where the pawn promotion will produce checkmate or stalemate but the player’s flag is about to fall. The player might place the new queen on the promotion square just before his flag falls, but if his opponent calls the flag fall before the player removes the pawn the player loses.
For that reason I’ve thought about including a reference to Rule 9E, but since that’s the very next rule in the rulebook I don’t think this is necessary.
Rule 9D already states that two things are required for a pawn promotion to be determined: (1) the pawn has to be removed; (2) the promotion piece has to be placed on the queening square and released from the player’s hand. If you state the two conditions which are required for determination you don’t have also to state that until those two conditions are met the promotion is not determined, because that follows as an obvious logical consequence.
The proposed change is almost a nullity. The only extra case it covers is where a player places a queen on the promotion square, without touching the pawn. At present, the player could try to take back the promotion arguing that he has not touched the pawn, and that until the pawn is touched, the business with the queen is just “touching a piece off the board”, for which there is no consequence. 10H, which covers touching pieces off the board, implies that putting a queen on a eighth rank square only comes under the touch-move rule after the pawn has been moved to that square. So it is really 10H on touch-move, rather than 9D and promotion determination which needs to be amended, if this scenario is really a problem. But is it?
Without this rules change, if a player placed a new queen on the promotion square, with or without touching the pawn on the 7th, took his hand off of the queen and then noticed that promoting to a queen produced stalemate or allowed mate, what would stop him from promoting to a knight instead?
I don’t think 10H needs to be changed to cover the situation where a player places a new piece on the promotion square while the pawn is still on the board. It’s analogous to the situation already covered in 10H where the pawn has been advanced the last rank.
Actually, all these scenarios also show that the FIDE rule is better. Under the USCF rules the promotion is determined when the promotion piece is “released” on the promotion square. Under the FIDE rules, the choice of promotion piece is “finalized” when the piece has touched the square of promotion.
So under the FIDE rules there is no possibility of putting a queen down, but not releasing it, seeing that it causes stalemate, and then changing to a different piece. That is better. The FIDE rules don’t answer the question of whether putting a promotion piece on the eight rank on a square to which a seventh-rank pawn could move, without touching any pawns first, commits the player to promoting the/a pawn.
Where in the current version of 9D or 10H does it say this? 9D says the move is determined when the pawn has been removed from the board and the player’s hand has released the new piece on the promotion square. 10H says that a player who advances a pawn to the last rank and then touches a piece off the board is not obligated to promote the pawn to the piece touched until that piece has been released on the promotion square. That’s the reason I’m proposing this change to 9D, to explicitly state that once the new piece has been released on the promotion square the move can’t be changed, even though it hasn’t been determined yet for the purpose of rule 9E until the pawn has been removed from the board.
Admittedly, unless the rules committee or TDCC tells me otherwise, that’s how I’d rule in a game now even without this rules change. In that sense you’re right that the rules change is unnecessary. But if at some point a player challenges my ruling the way a player challenged Harold Stenzel’s ruling at last year’s Eastern Chess Congress, I’d like to be able to point to a Rulebook Changes document which explicitly spells out the rules that govern pawn promotion when the pawn hasn’t been physically moved to the last rank.
I actually agree with you about that, but I don’t want to make too many changes at once in my proposed ADMs. Maybe if some day there is a rulebook revision to make USCF rules more consistent with FIDE rules this rule change can go into the new rulebook.
The counter-argument is that the rules already allow, when making a regular move, to put the piece down on a square, while keeping a finger on it, then looking all around to make sure the move is OK, then releasing it, with the possibility of changing to a different move with the same piece if you see a problem. I feel that it violates the spirit of “touch/move”, the intent of which seems to be to require players to analyze moves in your mind without the aid of manipulating pieces on the board. But I see young players doing this all the time, and also adult players, and it is allowed under the rules, both USCF and FIDE versions. I wonder if coaches are even telling their players to do this?
Thus, we allow players to make partial moves on the board and look around, with the square (if not the piece to be moved) finalized only upon release. Why should the selection of promotion piece be different? I like the FIDE rule about promotion better, but perhaps the USCF rule is more consistent.
Actually the wording does cover a situation where two different pawns can capture on the same square (black pawns on a2 and c2 and white knight on b1). Once the knight is replaced by a black queen, there must be a capture and a promotion to a queen, but which pawn promotes to the queen has not yet determined.