abandoned game

What just happened? Yeah i just made a very very stupid move i admit. I would have probably resigned. But before i had the chance the game said i had abandoned it and gave it my opponent. I had 14 minutes left on a rapid. He had about 11. its a moot point because i had in effect blundered my queen, but hey he is only 1100 so who knows what might have happened if i had  chosen to play on.  I dont care about the points. play like mine deserves retribution.  I just dont know what happened. i didnt seem to lose internet connection.  I suppose what he saw was "abandoned" rather than the more dignified "resigned": makes me look churlish. anyway..... is this a thing?

Sounds like you got disconnected. There's a newer rule in place that you have less time to reconnect in lost positions:

https://support.chess.com/article/338-how-does-game-abandonment-work

https://support.chess.com/article/213-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

thanks martin

I'm at 7,400 feet. We're clearly "rural" an don't have high speed internet. (But due to a State grant, fiber optic is NOW being trenched in our own property easement.  Yahoo!!!) We should have high speed internet within the month...!

Today I had to reset my router FIVE times.  (A record!) I've lost four games in the last five days due to "abandonment".  Man!  I cannot stand this phone company.

yep, he won fair and square....  i have seen some of my opponents just sit there and time out...... or offer draws in hopeless positions..... i laugh at them but i don't have respect.  If you have lost the position  either fight it right out, or acknowledge it,,, and a "good game' doesnt hurt.  

It's certainly possible for games to get abandoned in your opponents favour outside of the circumstances listed on this site. I recently lost a game via abandonment about one second after my opponent moved. Wasn't checkmate or anything, didn't run out of time. Just straight up told I lost via game abandoned. Hadn't been any pauses on moves up until then, no warning of a server reset. 

Reviewing the site info, if you're playing 3/0 and are -5 down, the idea that you can be punted after 15 seconds disconnect seems a bit harsh. Even if you're not -5 down, you've still only got 18 seconds. Consider:

a) It's totally normal for someone to think think 15 seconds on a difficult move;

b) Not exactly wasting your opponent's life if they have to wait a bit more than that;

c) You generally don't get told you've been disconnected in the first place. No flashing timer, no pop up box, no change in the number of reception bars;

d) There doesn't seem an adequate system to reconnect people that get temporarily disconnected. Like, the site considers you disconnected until you manually refresh the browser. But when you do refresh, you're instantly reconnected the very first time you try. I.e., maybe you were disconnected for two seconds, but not the 20 seconds it took you to refresh. This has happened to me dozens of times recently. Seems my opponent is thinking, give it a refresh, turns out they moved ages ago and it didn't show until that moment. At least it's a little more suspect when you move and your own timer still ticks down. Then you know to refresh right away. When you look at your opponent's clock, you never can be sure.

So in summary, yes people will have connections that suck. But the site should reasonably inform them of that, and should show the latest status of the game if they are actually connected, not only do so when they refresh a browser.

That has happened to me before. Not five times, but two times is not uncommon. So it may take 15 minutes to get reconnected by the time the router spools up and everything works like it's supposed to. Chances are the opponent is not going to wait 15 minutes for that. 

Your phone company and mine might have similar customer service protocols. We called to get our internet fixed, so they disconnected our phone for over a month. You know, because of covid of course. It's like a green light for them to do any stupid, incompetent, idiotic thing they want. 

We're stuck with CenturyLink in Colorado. There are THREE companies (in addition to them) vying for the broadband business opened up by the State grant. Dozens of my neighbors cannot wait to get free of CL.

Surprise, surprsie. Century Link here too. 

If there were any possible way to go below zero on a scale of one to ten, they would qualify. You literally would not believe the stories. 

The ugly tech trend continues in all facets of life... if you don't have brand new everything and the best available internet, regardless of your location, you're an unperson. Play daily. That way, 70% of the time you get to play against IM or GMs, as your unscrupulous opponent responds to your moves with whatever opening explorer says.

We’re so far in the boonies we can’t get a land line. (Only three miles from town) Century Stink starts about one mile further down the road, Charter Fable stops two miles from town. We were left with Dish or Indirect ( gag) satellite for internet. It was horrible and we were constantly lied to by both companies. Three months ago we got Starlink. What a difference. Went from 250-300 kbps to 25-30 mbps. 

Same thing just happened again. Was leading the game, made my move 3 s after my opponent did theirs, then bam, was told my opponent had won via abandonment. No indication of any issues. Game link: https://www.chess.com/game/dcccb3ec-93b1-11ec-b0f3-9e316c01000f . Only consolation is it's unrated.

At least the same thing is happening to my opponents now. Last couple of days have won via abandonment only a couple of seconds after the other player moved. No reason for any of the official abandonment reasons to apply.

The same just happened to me - that the game disconnected and my opponent got the point - but while I was in a clearly winning position!!! Link https://www.chess.com/game/live/56552427114. I don't understand, what happened?! My internet connection is always great and nothing else has been affected, so why did my opponent win the game when I was moves away from creating a mating net??