Game drawn - insufficient material

Can you point us to at least one of these games where you were awarded a draw for insufficient material when you think you should have won? All your games are archived and available forever.

There are stipulations in place in both UCSF and FIDE rules that a player can claim a draw if their opponent is purely trying to get a win on time.  These rules require arbitration by an official, and so it is difficult to incorporate them into an online site such as this one.  Chess.com has tried to do so by expanding the definition of "insufficient material" to include some situations where a mate is theoretically possible but not forceable, such as KNN vs. K.

Yesterday I had a blitz game, I had a rook some pawns and and pawn just queened, (while white was losing time intentionally till I queened) at the point of queening I got the message draw, insufficient material.

Can this be explained by any logic? will this happen in a real game? and what is the point of giving a draw if I have a 5|2 and when my time is over, it's over, but if I have time, why it gives draw in apparent winning position? this is totally unacceptable and unjust.

Can anybody please give me a logical explanation and the meaning of giving a draw?

Just to mention one more thing, I had 5 second left, but I don't think that could be a reason to judge the position as draw.

No, it didn't say I lost on time! and it showed I still have 4.5 seconds

If chess.com is concerned about fair play, they should notice that the other player is spending 40 second and more just to move his king to an X square...

I wrote to them, but I don't know if I'll get any answer.

40 seconds is not fine, if so, 2 minutes could be fine as well, to think where the king should go from the middle of the board (it was early to think about stealmate).

Thanks anyway.

Please let us know the result of your enquiry to Chess.Com about this. I can only see two possibilities. Either you were mistaken and ran out of time or their is a bug which needs to be fixed.

VM74, I agree with kaynight on this one.  You ran out of time, and chances are that you were also suffering from lag.  The lag would explain both why you thought you had time left as well as why your opponent was taking what seemed like a long amount of time to you.  The times you see on your computer are really just an estimate of the times at the server.  And if you're suffering from lag, then they're likely inaccurate estimates.

Well, now I'm calm :) and just to clarify the issue a bit more I want to add, that before the white king was left alone, the moves were refreshing quite quickly but at the end, it took too long until the white king repeated the waiting moves.

Da Waagh, Ok, I'll write sure in case I receive any answer. Actually it could be as Omnipaul is also saying that the time I see is not the same which's on the server. My connection is not so good, that could be one reason. By the way this was the second time this happened.

I was just wondering... if I had run out of time, shouldn't the server beside declaring the draw, tell something like "white out of time" so,  "draw due to insufficient material". That would have clarified the issue for someone quite new to the site (1 year).

Thanks guys, your points were of great help to understand the situation.

I just got the answer from Chess.com here it is

The “insufficient material” for Chess.com is this:

In cases where you or your opponent has insufficient material to mate (lone King, King + Knight, King + Bishop, King + 2 Knights) a draw will be automatically declared where there is a time-out.

I understand that, my time was out, and because white didn't have enough material to mate me, it was given a draw.

Caissa is like life - she does not care about fairness or skill. An unskilled player who delivers checkmate is beloved of Caissa and wins; a skilled player (without material) who merely avoids checkmate is spurned.

The goddess of chess.

VM74 wrote:

Yesterday I had a blitz game, I had a rook some pawns and and pawn just queened, (while white was losing time intentionally till I queened) at the point of queening I got the message draw, insufficient material.

Can this be explained by any logic? will this happen in a real game? and what is the point of giving a draw if I have a 5|2 and when my time is over, it's over, but if I have time, why it gives draw in apparent winning position? this is totally unacceptable and unjust.

Can anybody please give me a logical explanation and the meaning of giving a draw?

Sometimes queening is a waste of time. You had KR, who are great companions and don't need a queen messing around for winning 😊

You maybe should have checked the date; this thread is over 2 years old and the guy you're responding to hasn't logged in since November 2014.

LOL