It would be entertaining if Conditional Moves leading to a forced mate - within tournament games - were processed even if one of the protagonists was on vacation.

This could be used to resolve stalling within tournaments in positions such as these:

(Though it could have some unexpected consequences.)

Look, people who abuse the vacation time are jackasses to say the least, but I still can't figure out why everyone is so pissed off by it. Who cares if you have to wait a month for your opponent to get back from vacation... don't you have other things going on in your life that you can be doing meanwhile?

Non-tournament games should never be an issue.

Within a tournament, however, one staller can hold up the whole tournament. Most people are limited in the number of tournaments they can join, so it does seem a genuine issue in this case.

If one has ze means, yo!

I could envisage some awkward bug reports:

'I was on vacation for a month, one move fron being checkmated, and the game finished by itself!'

So this would be like, if they have one forced move, the system plays it for them and it's your turn again?

I would be nice if all forced mates could be done this way... somehow.

One difficulty with this approach is that it gives information to one player: he might not have been able to see the single forced move.

Hmm, that's true.  Maybe in the future we'll have developed machines that could automate this process.  If you can demonstrate forced mate to a program, the program will end the game as a win for you.

Even better add a vote system (and possibly even create a "TD" slot in tournaments where you would enter as a non-player only)

After a tournament is 90% complete, and in tournaments with at least x number of players, either opponent in the 10% active games are allowed to place their game up for a vote.  If, say, 80% of total players vote that this game is obviously won and the opponent is holding the tourney up, then the game is automatically ended in victory for the winning player.

The high % required tries to insure players don't unduly manipulate results of important games, and for the same reason this may not be available for tournaments with under 20-30 players.  Also this dimension would be clearly advertised at the start of the tourney, so it would be hard to complain when you knowingly joined.  This has the added benefit of letting the vote option's popularity determine it's success.  If it's effective and fair, players will undoubtedly prefer to create and join such tournaments.

What do you think?

I don't follow. If there is a forced move the opponent plays it or times out. Does it matter if either player is unaware the next move is forced?

In a forced sequence leading to mate, there's no effective difference between making the move (and reaching checkmate), or not seeing the move (so timing out or resigning).

If, however, there is merely one forced move (but no immediate mate) - and the player would resign if he can't find that move, then an automated move would be helping the player over that stumbling block.

That would be an amusing option to have: make forced moves for me whenever they occur.

Yeah, like sticking a gun to their a head & say " MOVE " yo!

It would be particularly strange to return to a game and not recognise the position - because several moves had been played automatically for you.

Twood be Chess a napping, yo!

Interesting concept (especially since I thought of it myself a few years ago). I suppose forced moves being made automatically might be a little annoying but not really so different from triggering a conditional.

I am one who believes my opponent has the right to use all the time allowed by the time control to make a move. But I don't think there's much sence in it when there's only one legal move. It's like that in vote chess. No matter what - you have to wait the alloted time and when my side has only one possible move then I wish there was some way to make that move right away and get on with the game.

So, I think I would be in favor of this but I also don't feel it is a high priority item. And I really hope they would fix some things that are broken before they invest a lot of time in something like this.

how about giving the tournament creator an overriding option to select the outcome of any game if needed. So if someone selected vacation with an obvious losing game the TD could decide the result as would happen for OTB competitions where a appeal was raised.

Such (absolute) power might corrupt (some) TDs.

Most definetely would lead to corruption, favoritism, even just plain ol' bad decisions. This would be a whole different issue than what we are discussing here, about forced moves being made automatically by the system.

 Some will but then no one will play in tournaments created by those people again. Or maybe just give function to the chess.com employees created tournaments. the forced mate idea would only work when there is a move or two left what happens when someone has a lost positions and decides to drag out the game by waiting till the last possible time to make each move and uses vacation as well.

This is true. I have a problem like this in some monthly tournaments I start at another website. There is one player who is holding up three of those tournaments because he is playing about 500 games currently and so he moves very slow. Everyone is waiting for his game(s) to end so we can move on to the next round(s). It takes a lot of the fun out of the tournaments and some people will probably not join my future tournaments because of that. So I don't invite him anymore. However, in this case the automation of forced moves would have no impact since this fellow resigns when he is losing.

If someone is faced with forced moves I can think of only three reasons why they would wait to make the move.

a) Because they don't know it's their turn

b) Because they can't see that it's forced.

c) Because they are a spiteful jerk.

Since a) and b) are unlikely I believe the implementation of some sort of automation of forced moves would be a boost to good sportsmanship in online chess because it would disable a player's ability to act like a jerk while still allowing them to be one. And I think it makes sense that when the game is over it should end. I know that if I were to find that I had just lost due to a forced mate in x number of moves that I would probably be surprised and I would also feel kind of dumb because I hadn't noticed.

I can think of nothing bad that would come from the automation of forced moves.