I observed an endgame last month where white missed a chance for a swindle stalemate. After the game, while they were analyzing the game (away from the playing area) I stopped by and asked black, “What would you have done if he had captured with his rook here?” He looked at me strangely, grabbed the rook off the back rank with a pawn capture, and said, “Queen!”. I replied, “Stalemate”; and the white player kicked himself for not playing the move.
Now here is the question:
The rule in question is 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, and completed when that player presses the clock.
It is not uncommon for a player to say to his/her opponent, “Queen” when he promotes a pawn, typically because the opponent has the captured pieces closer to him. It isn’t within the rules to do that, but it still is a common occurance.
If a player says “Queen” to his opponent, does that determine the move? If a player says “Queen” and his opponent immediately says “Stalemate”, can he change to a knight? (If I were in the opponent’s shoe, I’d quickly put the queen on the board and only then make the stalemate claim to eliminate this issue.)
If I were put in this situation, I’d rule that saying ‘queen’ determined the move; once the player violates the process in the rule book he should not then benefit from any claim stemming from the very process he ignored.
For promotions, as for other moves, you can verbally announce one move and make another. There is a “touch / move” rule, and there are rules about when moves are determined. But there is no such thing as an “announce / move” rule. So, if you say “Queen” and your opponent hands you a queen, but you do not place it on the promotion square, you can change to some other promoted piece. The opponent telling you that a move that has not been determined is stalemate does not lock you into that move. Suppose it is not a promotion situation, but the player has made a move but has not released the piece. Before he releases, the opponent says “Stalemate!”. The player is free to move that piece to a different square. He must move that piece because it has been touched, but until he releases it (determining the move), he can still move it to a different square, even if the opponent says “Stalemate!”.
No argument with anything you said. However, I was not intending to be discussing a case where the opponent hands the player a piece; I was referring to cases where I see the player call out a piece and the opponent places it for the player.
I agree that if the player puts out his hand and says, “Queen please” or even just “queen”, then his intent is to place the piece himself and therefore he has not determined his move per the rulebook. But what if he is giving a direction to his opponent? (Not allowed by the rules, but we’ve all seen it happen.)
If 9D doesn’t cover your situation (because it’s the opponent’s hand that releases the piece, rather than the player’s), the TD Tip under 8F6 does. There’s nothing to indicate that naming a piece determines a move; only the placement and release of a piece.
I’ve seen blitz games where a player pushes a pawn to the last rank, says “queen”, and subsequently moves the pawn as if it were a queen. The opponent usually acquiesces to this rather than forcing the player to replace the pawn with a queen or an inverted rook. I’ve heard of a case where a player did this, moved his pawn as if it were a queen and the opponent claimed a win because the player had made an illegal move! Strictly speaking I think the claim is valid under USCF rules: a pawn isn’t a queen just because a player says it is.
Following that same line of reasoning, if a player pushes a pawn to the last rank, says “queen”, and a queen would produce stalemate, the position is not stalemate because the pawn is still a pawn and the move hasn’t been completed. A player wanting to claim the draw should press the clock and tell his opponent to complete his move, and after the opponent has replaced the pawn with a queen or an inverted rook and taken his hand off it he can claim the stalemate.
An interesting question is what would happen if instead of telling the player who promoted the pawn to complete his move, the opponent completed the move for him by replacing the pawn with a queen and then claiming the stalemate. Could the player promoting the pawn change his mind and promote to a rook instead? I think my ruling would be that by saying “queen” the player authorized his opponent to act as his agent in helping him promote the pawn. The player could change his mind and promote the pawn to a different piece at any time up to the point where the opponent had placed the new queen on the promotion square and removed his hand from it, after which it would be too late.
A person other than the player moving and releasing pieces according to instructions from the players is definitely outside the rules, except in special circumstances such as games involving players with disabilities or where the players are computer programs. There are many possibilities for bizarre irregularities if anybody other than the players is manipulating the pieces on behalf or at the behest of players. Even more so if the opponent gets involved as the player’s agent in making moves. Conflict of interest.
That said, if the player says “Queen”, and the opponent picks up a Queen, places it on the promotion square, releases it, and, then before the player presses his clock, announces “Stalemate”, I would rule that “Queen” was not clearly an instruction to the opponent to place the queen on the promotion square. It could have been a request for the opponent to hand over the Queen. Therefore, the opponent has exceeded this request by placing the Queen, and the promotion has not been determined. The opponent is getting ahead of himself by announcing stalemate because the move has not been determined.
In these weird cases where other people are moving pieces on a player’s behalf, the move is not determined when the assistant releases the piece but when the player does something to indicate that he accepts that his instructions have been complied with, such as touching and releasing the queen himself, completing the move by pressing the clock, or some verbal indication.
Thus, if the player had said, “Please put the Queen on the promotion square for me”, and the opponent does, then the promotion to queen is determined when the Queen is released (by the opponent), and the game is stalemate. Similarly, if the player says “Queen”, and then “Thank you” after the opponent places the Queen, then the promotion is determined. But just “Queen” by itself doesn’t tell us enough about the intentions of the player, and the placement of the queen by the opponent does not determine the move.
Admittedly it’s a gray area not covered directly in the rulebook, and different TDs might rule differently. From the opponent’s point of view the safest thing to do to ensure a favorable ruling from the TD would be to hand the queen to the player promoting the pawn and wait for him to place it on the promotion square and release his hand from it before announcing the stalemate.
I don’t think that the opponent constructing a position on the board, even a plausible one, can be construed as causing stalemate.
In the situation Mr. Messenger describes above, I would not rule in favor of the opponent claiming an illegal move. In this case the opponent has clearly moved before the player has completed his move, and at best the position should be restored to the middle of the player’s move after he has pushed the pawn to the “queening” square. Please see 8F6 topic for more discussion.
Under this rule, in blitz chess there is no going back to a previous position, because in blitz chess “illegal moves unnoticed by both players cannot be corrected afterwards.”
I’m having second thoughts about whether an illegal move claim is valid in this situation, though, because I’ve just noticed another blitz rule:
I have to say that I don’t like this rule, but as a TD it’s my duty to enforce it. The rule apparently legitimizes the practice of moving a pawn to the eighth rank, announcing that it’s a queen, but saving time by not replacing the pawn with a physical queen. Apparently this rule supersedes the regular rule 8F7:
In rule 8F7 it’s up to the player who promotes a pawn to replace it with a new queen or whatever. Blitz rule 17 apparently shifts this responsibility to the opponent. What’s not stated in blitz rule 17 is what happens if the opponent doesn’t choose to exercise his “option” of stopping the clocks while a replacement piece is found. Let’s say that no one replaces the newly promoted pawn with a queen, and on the next move the first player moves the pawn as if it were a queen. Is this an illegal move? If it is, then what’s the point of blitz rule 17? Why would the opponent choose to stop the clocks while a replacement piece was found if by doing nothing and waiting for the first player to move the pawn the opponent would have the chance of winning the game?
In order to give blitz rule 17 meaning, I think I’ll have to go back to my original interpretation of the rules, before I heard about the illegal move claim: if neither player replaces the new pawn with a queen the pawn nevertheless really is a queen and can be moved as such. If either player gets tired of having to keep track of which pawns are queens and which are pawns, that player can stop the clocks before making a move and replace the pawn with the promoted piece.
What about regular chess and quick chess? I’d probably rule the same way as for blitz chess, to keep things consistent, except that in regular and quick chess if a player moves a pawn to the last rank and doesn’t replace it with a new piece the opponent can press the clock and tell him to complete his move under rule 8F7.
Rule 17 in the current USCF blitz rules is similar to rule 17 in the WBCA rules:
The words “up until the end of the game” show that the intent of the WBCA rule, at least, is what I surmised: that in blitz chess a player is allowed to move a pawn to the last rank, promote it (presumably by saying “Queen”, “Rook” etc., although this isn’t stated in the blitz rules), and then move the pawn as if it were the promoted piece. The opponent can stop the clocks in order to replace the pawn with a new physical piece, either immediately or on any subsequent move “up until the end of the game.”
If this interpretation is correct, then apparently at blitz chess, if a player moves a pawn to the last rank, says “Queen”, and the new queen would produce stalemate, the opponent can claim a draw by stalemate without waiting for the pawn to be replaced by a physical queen.
I think the blitz rules for pawn promotion should be changed to be the same as at regular and quick chess, and moving a (physical) pawn as if it were a queen should be considered an illegal move. A pawn shouldn’t become a queen just because the player who promotes it says “Queen”. In the alternative, if a pawn does become a queen when the player says “Queen” and the player can move it as such, the rules should say this explicitly.
I’m strongly considering submitting an ADM to this effect.