common resign!!

You are not alone, many are currently complaining about this unsportsmanlike practice.

In losing situations, I tend to concentrate more on trying to find a line that works. That inevitably leads to longer thinking time :P

Along the same lines- in half of my won games, I have to play these won endgames like queen and pawns vs. king straight up to the point where I've checkmated the other guy. What's the logic behind not resigning there?

If its live chess, they may be hoping you will run out of time.

No matter what your rating is, you may blunder and stalemate the opponent.  Heck, I just played a guy a few weeks ago, queened a pawn, and then about 3 moves later gave it up for nothing.  Happens to the best of us, and many people want you to prove that you can convert the point.

Go make coffee.

i dont mind playing the computer until the bitter end because im already expecting it not to resign. but how surprised was i when i got computer hard to offer me a draw in a lost position once. i thought it was poor sportsmanship.

The computer is using an engine, which is cheating and the worst form of poor sportsmanship.

clearly my comment about poor sportsmanship was not to be taken seriously. it's a computer, after all.

I personally have no issue playing a game out to the end.. my only issue is people who choose to loose on time instead of resign.  I think they are hoping with 7 or 15 minutes i'll get bored and disconect or offer a draw.

I love when you're playing a live match and your opponent just stares at the square where you can force mate them with their mouth open, probably hoping that you'll forget about it lol. 

people are getting off topic here, and il say it again - we're talking about lost possitions here, clearly lost possitions where an opponant has clearly left because he has lost the game.

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/livechess/leaving-the-time-running-instead-of-resigning

I was just recently playing a game with a 2 day time control. My opponent let his clock run out. IMO that is a bit rude. His position wasn't even all that bad. There were still plenty of chances for a draw. OTOH, emergencies do come up. Internet connections go down. Computers break down. There are some legitimate reasons for a person to time out. However, it shouldn't happen all that often.

Sometimes I have been playing on line and I get an important phone call, someone comes to the door, etc - if that happens I will resign and then type something like "gotta go, sorry."  Presumably someone will want to beat me because they played better and not because I had a higher priority.  (In case you didn't know, blitz chess on line IS a pretty low priority activity...).

There are many examples in chess where someone finds a miraculous save in a hopeless position, a "clearly lost" position, so I understand how people would rather keep thinking in hopes of finding something instead of resigning.

Even though it can irritate the person on the winning side...actually though winning on time is easier than finding a winning move, isn't it.

ok guys it really looks like im going to have to explain what i mean by 'clearly lost' because you guys all seem to think its some positional advantage that cant be overcome. im talking about being a rook and a bishop down, a queen down, a clearly lost endgame or something like that where everyone can see how it is OBVIOUSLY LOST. i know to you guys with much higher ratings that might seem like something that can be argued over, but im talking about situations where i show how a possition is my type of lost and im jsut left to wait.

is there a rating difference between time outs and resigning?  some people use anything they can to keep their ratings higher.

what you are doing is defending a hypothetical retard with no sense of manners, sense of the game of chess, nor the capacity to respond to me when i ask them if they are still there. you defend this guy who will play in consistant time gaps between moves, play out to a loss, and then suddenly stop and take a break for five minutes while he ponders at how he has played such bad chess and how he will regain the possition after some move.

this is who you will let take hours of time away from us? these will be the friends of chess.com and not those who want to actually play?

At the risk of going off topic, may I ask:  What is the common practice on resigning?  This month I have two much better players on this site resign long before I would have expected and in one game before it was really decisively won.  Generally, I resign two moves after I decide that there is no hope and no prospect for any hope in a game, but I get the feeling that people expect me to have resigned sooner.  Is there some unwritten rule I don't know about?