Chess.com for Tigers: 1. The mystery of the fair play rules
Copyright © 2019 Ammerbucher - All rights reserved.
As said, fair play is very important. Because of sportsmanship, but also because if you do not play fair, you can be banned from this site.
Tigers want to use any options they have. But Tigers want to live, they don’t want to get trapped or shot. That’s why they follow the rules.
But do you already know the rules you should follow here? Even if you say “yes”, you might be wrong …
There is a paragraph about (no) cheating and computer help here, in the terms and conditions of the site.
It says:
“You can NEVER use chess programs (Chessmaster, Fritz, etc) to analyze current ongoing games unless specifically permitted (such as a computer tournament, etc). The only type of computer assistance allowed is games databases for opening lines in Turn-based Chess and Vote Chess. You cannot receive ANY outside assistance on Live Chess games.”
However, that’s not all, additional fair play-rules of Chess.com are fixed here.
If the legal terms already are not to be found easily (there’s a link at the very bottom on the main page for example), these additional fair play rules are literally concealed. You can find them if you search for “fair play” in help – but frankly: Who does that?
Nevertheless, they are regarded as binding. Well, as a jurist, I doubt that, but nevertheless I think it’s a good advice not to chance that.
Besides, binding or not, I guess they can be regarded as a kind of common standard here, so one should respect them one way or the other.
Thus everybody should read them. Know them. And understand them. But the latter is not as easy as it seems.
Rules have to be simple. Yet life is complicated.
There’s always a difference between the wording and the application of a rule, because every rule, necessarily, has to leave room for interpretation. (Otherwise, it would not be a rule, but an authority to tell you what you have to do all the time.)
That applies even to rules that have a clear wording.
I have recently started some discussions about that in the Cheating Forum. A spontaneous reaction there has been (typically): “Just follow the rules”. But that’s not always that easy – at least not, if you do not want to renounce something that might be allowed.
Because, alas, some of these rules are not clear at all.
For example one rule says: “In Daily Chess (turn-based games with several days per move), you may consult any resource which is not engine-based. This includes books, opening databases (including the Chess.com Explorer) for [www.chess.com/openings|opening moves], and thematic games (though not their engine analyses). Table-bases are NOT allowed.”
This is the original passage. Do you notice something? The second sentence is grammatically not correct. Either the square brackets are somehow extended too far, or the word “for” is unnecessary.
This is not something that can just be ignored. Because the Chess.com Explorer is a very important tool (I will explain its function more detailed in the following posts). Above all, it is a database that contains complete games, also middle and endgames. So the question is: Are you only allowed to use the explorer for opening moves or not? What is wrong in the above text, the brackets or the “for”? (If the explorer is useful at all in middle and endgames is a different question. But yes, it is. I will dwell on that in the following chapters, too.)
Also the wording in the (shorter) legal terms and conditions of the site (already quoted above) is:
“The only type of computer assistance allowed is games databases for opening lines in Turn-based Chess and Vote Chess.”
Similar question here: Is “games databases for opening lines” just the description of the tool, or does this mean that this tool is only allowed “for opening lines”? The wording is totally dubious. Actually, both answers are possible.
I asked this very question in the official “Cheating Forum”, which is not about how to cheat best, but how to define and fight cheating, and where such questions are dealt with. And other than the wordings in the fair play rules and the legal terms might suggest, the answer was that the use of the explorer itself indeed is allowed through the whole game!
There are more rules which might be not as clear there as it seems. I will come back to these later. Just a warning here: Be careful with the use of engines, even with the chess.com analysis on finished games (Daily chess or even vs. computer), when you have ongoing games with similar openings and positions. That might be regarded as cheating, even if the rules (at least in my opinion) are not clear in that point at all.
So the written rules are important, but even they need some interpretation, and there are many situations where they do not tell you exactly what is right or wrong.
Yet there is another helpful rule, or directive. In life, but also in chess, we should regard something that is called the categorical imperative (following Immanuel Kant), or the “golden rule”. I would like to quote it here in the version of @MGleason, an admin of the Cheating Forum. He recommended as a decisive question for fair play to ask yourself: "What would I want one of my opponents to do if they were in this situation?"
I would call this the golden rule of chess.
So in the following I would like to talk about playing on Chess.com like a tiger, but always in accordance with that fair play directive in general – and the written fair play rules.
Good luck!
