Nova Daily - 26 February 2025

Hi!

Earlier this month I got into a discussion with one of my teammates about resigning. It's an interesting topic, and there are many questions that influence the decision to do so. Do you resign? When do you resign? And why do you resign?

You will find that if you're playing against a very strong player, they will not easily throw in the towel. And very often they find a way to mix things up even with two pawns down, and you still have to fight for the win. And the thought creeps into your head: "Why don't you resign?" And you get frustrated, your thoughts get distracted, thinking all kinds of awful stuff about them. And in your blind rage you suffer from a small tactical oversight. You mess up, that hyena across the board seizes the opportunity, suddenly you lose. And your whole day is ruined. You'll hate them for forever.

Resigning

To start off with: it's rather pointless to become angry with your opponents for not resigning. Why should you feel angry with your opponent when they allowed you to obtain such a beautiful position? Enjoy your position! It's much more fun for you than it is for your opponent. This is what you worked for.

The most likely reason why you think your opponent should resign is because you might have done so in their position, and you feel entitled to determine when the game ends, because your position is so overwhelming. But that's your ego doing the blabbing. It's not true. It's not your job to decide when your opponent resigns. That's their job, and to my knowledge there is no rule that prescribes that you must resign a game at any point. Your opponent is perfectly allowed to do so, and th. (This excludes stalling in correspondence or consultation chess, which is just a sign of lousy sportsmanship.)

Your only job in winning positions is to progress the game towards its rightful conclusion. So you have to play the right moves, and that's the only thing that you should be thinking about. Everything else is noise.

I personally almost never resign, and I never do so quickly. There's almost always some room to wiggle, some tricks, some practical problems for the opponent to overcome. You can often create counterchances, even a piece down. My threshold for resigning is when I see absolutely no counterchances anymore. I don't mind if I'm three pawns down in an endgame: I'll play on until I'm out of ideas. Nothing is to be gained from forfeiting, except for a little bit of time that you'd otherwise have used for the game. No game has ever been won by resigning (although my friends and I used to joke about some people that "Even if you resign against them, you still win!").

The game

Today's game was one in which not resigning ultimately paid off. This marathon game lasted for over an hour. I'll present the game now and add my thoughts and the analysis tomorrow.

The game was fun. I grossly overpressed in the endgame, hoping to find winning chances because I didn't want to draw. I should have lost because of this, but I escaped with a well-known stalemate trick that my opponent missed because he was living off his increment at the end.

This calls for an endgame study. I'm contemplating to do the analysis in three parts. The opening and middlegame phase should go linked together because one followed naturally after the other. The second part would be the practical and theoretical rook endgame, and the third is the theoretical endgame of Queen vs Rook. There's so much to take away from this study that it's almost a crime not to delve much deeper into this.

Stay tuned!