2015 edition of the wonderfully amusing Cardiff and Vale Schools Championships coming up this weekend...
Children's chess
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Cardiff and Vale Schools U8/U9 2015
> A pawn on the first rank! How it got there is an interesting question. I can think of these possibilities - it started there, it got moved backwards, opponent moved it thinking it was their pawn, it got knocked by a trailing arm.
> KQRRBP vs KP. The pawns are blocking each other so can't move. White is randomly checking. 50-move rule count had reached 42, and we were starting to breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of declaring a draw... when white captured the pawn and reset the count to zero.
> I'm not sure if this was a mistake or if the kid was trying it on. He had a pawn on the 6th, and promoted it by moving it two squares!
I also made a pretty bad error myself, which I feel a little guilty about. KQR vs K. White makes an illegal move - moves his king next to the black king. I said that's not allowed, make another move. So he gave checkmate with his rook instead. They asked if it was checkmate, I said yes and they shook hands. A few minutes later I realised I'd messed up because it was touch-move on the king, and I shouldn't have allowed him to move the rook at all.
Had this at the club the other week:
Kid: "Hey, he touched his king, that's touch-move, he's got to move it!"
Me: "Come on now, there is no legal move with the king, he can't move it, so touch-move doesn't apply here."
Kid: "Yes there is a legal move with the king - he can resign!"
hahahaha that's great
I know from experience that things like this happen in junior chess. 2 years ago when I was 10 I was playing in the UK chess challenge megafinal and qualified to the next round merely because I claimed my opponent moved her rook on my move when I went to the toilet so her checkmate would work and I came back ready to resign but then I checked my scoresheet and said "how on earth did that rook get to h8 huh?" And then I informed the adjudicator and he said that my opponent forfeited the game by doing that so I won
And this wonderful tournament is coming round yet again a week Sunday...
Well, in Cardiff in the Vale schools championship under 8s 2016 we had...
The incredible zombie bishop!
A white bishop is captured on a8 (I think it took one rook and then was recaptured by the other rook, or something like that). Anyway, black removes the bishop from the board but only just, so it's right next to the a8 square. A few moves later, a flailing arm knocks the bishop back onto the corner square! Neither player consciously clocks this, and the bishop is resurrected, white moves it again, and it continues to play a part in the game!
You could argue that technically she is right if they weren't writing the moves down (which is assume was the case if they were 8?)
I suppose that in a game where every third move is an illegal move anyway, both kings spend half the game in check, and pieces get lost by being knocked off the table by arms being waved about.... What harm is one strange refereeing decision on top of all the other stuff?
You could be correct that the head TD did not want to go along with the draw claim by the young girl since the moves were not recorded (he did not have time to explain his reasoning to me since he was extremely busy at the time). The kids were not required to record their moves since this scholastic tournament was not USCF -rated. But since the young boy did not disagree with the girl's claim, her claim should have been granted once she demonstrated the 3-fold repetition of the position to me. The young boy did not contest her claim, but merely indicated that he did not know about the rule. Under these circumstances, I think she should have been awarded her draw claim.