I have written in this forum concerning problems that I was having during tournament play. (See same Subject dated 02/06/12 for a complete discussion). The problem consisted primarily of two situations, which occurred between games in a tournament. The first was that an ad for an upgrade to premium membership would appear during the change of opponents, and I could not remove it despite clicking the "X" button in the corner.  So I paid to upgrade my account.

Then during the change of opponents, a board would appear with a white haze covering it, a spinning cube, with the message "Loading".  This would continue until the chat window informed me that I had lost the game due to abandonment.  I contacted Tech Support, but never resolved the issue. I assumed that some conflict between my system and Chess.com existed, although, I found others who had experienced similar problems dating back over a year.  After several of these episodes, I cancelled my premium membership, and decided not to play in tournaments anymore.

The insult came, when prior to each regular game, a message box would appear informing me that wasting other players time or disconnecting during play, violated the TOS, and I could lose my account for such behaviour.  This message came in a box with an "OK" at the bottom to acknowledge your consent.  A couple of weeks ago, I lost three games with zero moves after clicking on the "OK" button, and having the message disappear, but the white box remained blocking the board.  At this point I was ready to give up live play altogether.

However, a couple of days ago, late at night, I decided to enter a 15/10 tournament and take my chances.  Sure enough, around the third game, the "OK" button failed to remove the white box, and I could not access the game board.  I wrote to my opponent in the chat window, that I could not play, but what were they to do?

Then I noticed above the annotation window, two game tabs. One had the name of the game that I was currently involved in, and the other had the name of a game which I had gone to view between my games.  I clicked on the prior game tab and eventually was taken to that board where the game was over.  I then pressed the game tab for my game and was taken back to my game and the white block was gone.

I had lost 2:30, but was able to compete in the game.  So if anyone else finds themselves locked out of a tournament game and you have an alternative game tab, try clicking on it and coming back and you may get back into your game.  I just hope you are playing a long game.

Good Luck,

elginvonholtz

Instead of creating a new response going to edit this one, as yo uedited all your message...

It sounds like you are having conection problems. What speed of internet you have?

No, I obviously did not since the problems continure to occur.  If you read my previous post, you will see all the things that I did in an attempt to stop the problem.  This post was simply to inform other players that I did find a way to work around the problem and continue to participate. 

I have similar problem, will try to use explorer instead of mozilla, today was logged out from 2 tournaments. In other chess services there is a nice solution, even if you have logged but poor internet connection , you can come back even after few minutes, program automaticly calls you have 1 game running and asks you if you want to carry on playing. Will have to send this suggestion somwhere.

PS.Its really frustrating to be logged out whith a message you abandoned the game afterwards... :-)

i'm new to this website and i joined a 3 min blitz tournament and i think it was the 3rd game i played an ad poped up and i didn't see any X to close the ad and i couldn't move at all so i lost a game without even moving. so i just withdrew from the tournament.