It’s a sudden death situation. Black is trying to queen a pawn, but is running very short on time. Black has just moved and hit his button when White notices that Black’s flag has fallen. White stops his clock and summons you as TD, claiming a win on time. Black objects, claiming that it should be a draw on time under rule 14E2. You look at the board and see that the position is as follows:
Black has nothing but a king at a2 and a pawn at a3.
White has nothing but a king at c2 and a knight at d3.
How would you rule in this situation, and on what basis?
Win for White, since 14E2 includes “… and does not have a forced win,” and White has a mate in 3. I’m not entirely happy with this rule, since it makes the result depend to some extent on the TD’s playing ability, but I don’t have anything better to offer.
White has a win with Nb4+, forcing Black to move Ka1, followed by Kc1, forcing Black to move a2, at which point White can mate with Nc2. But it would be naive to expect that every TD would know this.
As I read the rule, any TD who knew this would have to call it a win for White, and it shouldn’t even depend on whether White knows he has a win, since the rule only talks about whether he has a forced win - not whether he knows it.
But a TD who didn’t see the winning strategy would presumably call it a draw, at which point White (assuming that he saw the winning strategy) would have to protest and try to explain to the TD how he had a forced win.
What is unpleasant about this is that if White didn’t see the winning strategy, then his game would end up with a different outcome depending on the knowledge level of the TD.
The cute board position, btw, was taken from a problem in Bruce Pandolfini’s book Chess Challenges.
Note that with a 5 second delay, there’s no point in White calling Black’s flag - if he sees the mate he can simply execute it.
For those who don’t like rules of the form “unless there is a forced…”, the challenge is to write a better rule that gets to the correct result more often than the current rule.
I agree that rules which depend on the TD’s playing ability are suspect - as are rulings on positions which might require the player to explain the plan (meaning that weak players get different rulings than strong players).
Here, I think there’s a pretty good compromise: when the TD is strong enough, everyone gets the same ruling (WIN for White). In the case where the TD is too weak to see the mate, the White player is allowed to educate the TD (and, I recommend that he educate the TD as part of his initial presentation of the claim - do NOT wait until the TD gets it wrong and then appeal!). Note that this is not really about “does the player know how to do it”, but is instead a case of the player who does know educating a TD who does not. [this may be too subtle for some people, but I think it’s an important distinction - notice that a TD who DOES see the mate does not need to quiz the White player to find out if he knows how to execute the mate].
Now, it’s true that if both the TD and the White player don’t see the mate, then we get the wrong result. That’s a defect in the rule. The question is: how do you fix it?
To me, the first question is “Does it really need to be fixed?” If it does my vote would be fix it by adding, “does not have a forced win as demonstrated by the opponent.” But I’m in the camp which believes that claims about positions which change a game result should depend on the player knowing how to have changed the result.
So if a player doesn’t know enough about the position to appeal an incorrect ruling there still isn’t a problem in my eyes from an ethical situation (though I’d agree that’s not the rule at present, and wouldn’t deliberately rule that way in a game.) And, if there’s going to be a wrong ruling and forthcoming appeal, I’d rather see a win accidentally decided as a draw initially than a draw accidentally decided as a win initially.