Continuing to play a game where you have no hope of winning or drawing is torture all on it’s own. But the real question is when to decide that you have no chance. I’m a pretty stubborn player when I’m down, and I’ll only resign if my player has pieces or pawns that I can’t stop from promoting, and I have no pieces or passed pawns of my own to counter with. I wouldn’t get much satisfaction out of my opponent stalemating me unless it’s the situation where I park my king in front of an advancing pawn to stop him from promoting. I’m an under 1200 player so I always feel like I have a chance as long as I have pieces on the board; I suppose for a master or near-master it’s different.
Agreed - the level of competition comes into play in this ‘when to resign’ consideration as well. All players blunder, but lower rated players do it more frequently - I would definitely play out positions against a 1200 player that I would resign to a master.
Winners never quit.
I don’t mind if my opponent plays on, I enjoy giving checkmate.
If I am losing, which I have done plenty of, I play until I see I have nothing left to play on with.
The loser needs to balance his/her own physical fatigue, mental and psychological exhaustion with whatever subjective value can be taken from the position and its possibilities.
There is also an embarrasment factor at hand: it is bad enough to lose a game, worse yet to have a lopsided loss on display for all one’s peers to see.
Two stories. The first, everyone knows. The second, very few do.
The first is Steinitz vs. von Bardeleben. Steinitz was very upset that his opponent, “Saw it. Went home.” and he could not play the beautiful mate over the board.
The second was when Nakamura, a.k.a. “Smallville”, was playing 1min vs. 3min on the ICC. After each game, the final position would stay up for just a few seconds before the next game started. Nakamura’s opponent did not resign, and Nakamura proceeded to Queen pawn after pawn. In the final mating position, only up for a couple seconds, he had six Queens forming a smiley-face in the middle of the board. 
But do you enjoy it if the opponent still has 30 minutes on his clock, has only one legal move, is facing your immediate and obvious checkmate on the following move, and just sits there and lets his clock run?
Bill Smythe
A player will allow his clock to run when he sees the Cheshire cat look on your face because you are enjoying yourself too much. Or you are sighing, walking around impatiently, or talking to other players about how bored you are. Then he will let every second of his clock to run off. Now if you should run to the TD to complain about his behavior, he has evidence to complain about your own. Just play the game, mark your result, and move on. There is no long term value to sadistically torturing another player for not resigning in a timely fashion. It will be remembered and come back to you. Karma is a b****.
I have only seen that happen online. Over the board, most people are human about things, in my experience.
So, leaving aside the question of “torturing a non-resigner”, let’s say a player has an hour left on his clock and only one legal move, but he refuses to make that move because he will be mated if he does.
Would you consider him to be not “[competing] in a spirit of good sportsmanship”?
As a TD, if his opponent brought a complaint to you, what action, if any, would you take in such a situation?
I would examine the situation to see if it could reasonably determined that the player had abandoned the game, even if he was sitting at the board. If so, I would adjudicate the game appropriately. See 20H.
Alex Relyea
There is a good story in My Opponent Is Eating a Doughnut (by Tim Just and Wayne Clark) about such a case. I will briefly paraphrase.
A TD observed a player in a scholastic tournament who had only three legal moves, each of which led directly to being checkmated, sitting at the board and obviously showing no interest in moving. The TD took the player aside and privately asked what he was doing. The player just gave the TD a blank stare. The TD informed him that he had the right to use his time to calculate his next move, but it was unsportsmanlike to sit at the board and refuse to move because the player would be unhappy with the outcome. The TD then gave the player a list of options at the TD’s disposal for handling the situation. The penalties the TD listed started with “nothing” and grew in severity up to loss of the game and expulsion from the tournament. The TD then told the player “I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I’m going to sit down and consider my options.” The TD then advised the player he should do the same.
After about a minute, the player resigned and reluctantly shook hands with the opponent. The TD in this story considers that the best ruling he never made.
This was prior to 18G1 being in the rulebook.
20H doesn’t really cover this situation where the player is at the board, but refusing to move. Applying this, or 20H1 requires the offending player to be absent without permission for at least 15 minutes, which isn’t the case here. The rule that is on point is 18G1.
Under 18G1, you have to have an “emergency” to apply the rule. The rule suggests that the right to adjudicate be published in advance publicity. What emergency applies in the given example? The only one I would consider pressing is the need to pair the next round in a timely fashion. From the given facts in the examples, it is not clear that the player has “abandoned” the game. He is sitting there at the board thinking. Rule 20H only applies if he has left the board for a considerable length of time.
I recall two distinct examples of players who spent 45+ minutes examining the board without making a move before resigning. The first was a game I witnessed where an IM resigned and said he was just thinking about what opening he was going to play the next round. The second was a game I played against a strong, experienced player who said he was just going over the game trying to figure out what went wrong and if there was any chance to fix it. In each case, the players related that they spent some time mentally kicking themselves before giving up. In both cases, had a TD intervened there would have been a considerable argument over TD interference in the game. I would have objected to the TD bothering my opponent, too, as I know how hard it is to give up and resign a game after you have worked so hard and decide to make one last stand to find a resource, however strange, to save the game.
Maybe. 18G1 includes “… or is present but shows little interest in considering the position.”
I had a game once where it was clear Black had a winning position. White had about twenty minutes left on his clock and, while he was at the board, it was clear that he had no interest in the game. He barely looked at the board. I didn’t intervene because he tossed off a move every few minutes. Later he took the test for Senior TD.
Alex Relyea
Probably bad sportsmanship, but in the past year I decided that if I am playing a non-resigner OTB, that while I will not drag things out by a dozen moves, I will, if I have sufficient time and have cleared the board, I will make a point to mate my opponent in the corner.
If I can deliver checkmate on a8 instead of a7 or b7 I will do so every time, and usually just extra 10 seconds to force the king to a corner, followed by making eye contact with my opponent sends a message without ever saying a word or deliberately mating with six knights Naka style or something.
It’s TBD if the message I am sending is that I am a jerk.