What is the most SURPRISING incident happen with you while playing OTB tourney?

My first big OTB tournament was in the Chicago Open.  It was the first round; I was rated around 900 or so and my opponent was 1100 or 1200.  We were seated about in the middle of a long row where you needed to go past at least a dozen players to get to the end of the row.

My opponent apparently wanted to freak me out because after every one of his moves he would get out of his chair, walked to the end of the row and come and stand behind me as a I looked at the board.

I got so flustered that I soon lost that game.  I didn't know it at the time, but I should have complained to the TD.  To this day I'm bothered by the fact that I let that guy get to me.

I had a bit of "revenge" later when I beat one of his "buddies" in the 5th round.

According to FIDE chess rules " It is forbidden to distract or annoy the opponent in any manner whatsoever..."

I found it annoying and distracting, so I think I would have been within my rights to ask the TD to tell him to stop.  there was another table with players behind me, so he was directly behind me.

@firebrandX (and Samsch): I never said I had a problem with him watching from behind.  This guy was hovering.  You said as long as he didn't touch me, he should be okay.  I say that if I reach up to put both hands on my head (elbows out, fingers interlaced) and I bump into the guy hovering over my shoulder...that's too close.   That's not arbitrary nor unreasonable and I think any TD would back me up on that.

You say as long as he doesn't touch me, it should be okay.  Would you feel distracted if your opponent put his head over your shoulder with his face 6 inches from yours, you wouldn't consider this annoying or distracting?  There is a limit.

I was playing in a local interscholastic tournament and my opponent forgot to hit the clock after 1. e4. I stared at the board, pretending to think intensely about my next move while covering my mouth with my hands to hide a smile. My opponent was stifling laughter, visibly amused by my seeming stupefaction at the King's Pawn Opening. After about 10 minutes, my opponent was obviously extremely tickled by the time it was taking me to think... until he himself looked at the clock and pressed it under a blush of mortification. He was already down 10 minutes and proceeded to receive a crushing loss.

by FIDE rules if his clock ran all the way down to 0 without you moving, the game would count for tournament purposes but not be rated. Each player has to make a move for the game to be rated. I don't know how the USCF rules work here.

It's actually illegal for the guy observing to say anything, if your opponent did not see the rook is pinned and thinks the game is over and shakes your hand.. you actually win the game believe it or not.

As opposed to the observer, if he said that and he is playing in the tournament, there would be a penalty on him.

Holy moly.  I played in that event in the U1600 (tied first) and don't remember that happening. Must have been after I finshed a game and left the room.  As I recall Wojo  won the event easily.

I remember my first OTB game; I was up several pieces but still lost on time because I didn't understand the clock thing.

Lot of such cheating goes on at that particular tournament, I'm told.

there was a girl at the otb tournament and i think thats a pretty surprising incident

lol.

In years past slapping someone in the face with your glove was the challenge to a duel.

This game actually happeened in a club tournament (30/90 60 SD) between two 1600s from what I remember:

At this point white tried to play Nf2 and spent some time trying to figure out why it looked strange.

***

Used to go to this one (elementary and high) school tournament every year.  They didn't have clocks but had to keep on schedule so the TD would, with a cursory look, declare a winner and award them 3/4 a point giving 1/4 to the loser.  Only the TD either wasn't very good or didn't care very much as he often scored a game the wrong way or he'd declare the winner of a close game simply because of a small space advantage.  The funniest part about it was that one guy from our high school team graduated and went to college in the same city where this tournament was in.  So the following year he entered the tournament with us just for laughs despite being too old.  During the awards ceremony, the organizers singled him out and gave him a special award... sporstmanship.

that's weird..

Those must have been the proverbial kid gloves.

I'll grant you, I've never had 3-fold 160 moves apart, especially given my longest game is 134 moves all told, but I have had multiple instances of non-back-to-back-to-back.

I had one game where I was Black in South Carolina where the first and third were about 10 moves apart.

I had another in North Carolina as White where I had my King and 2 Bishops, Black had his King, a Knight, and 3 pawns (a, b, and c, along the diagonal, it was either a5-b6-c7 or a4-b5-c6, so one of my Bishops basically stopped the pawn advancement.  The 3 occurrances I know for this one occurred on White's 53rd, 58th, and 62nd moves

I was at a chess tournament with the rest of the highschool chess team and play this game against a girl that was... distracting in a sense.  I played her to a stalemate (rook and king on both sides) to a fifty move draw.  Then, she proceded to anhialate three of the best players on my team.  She was pissed at me for continuing the game for another 30 minutes.  Thinking back on it, I still had 15 minutes on my clock and could have just sat there for a while before making my last move since she was already pissed at me and there was no reason not to.  I was kind of hoping that the extra fifty moves would have thrown off her game for the rest of the tournament, but I was the only person she didn't beat, so I guess I have something to be proud of.  (I was surprised that that game was the reason our team beat hers by one point.)

no, because if I had lost that game, it would have been 8 points to 8 points, not 8.5 to 7.5 and I don't consider it as being rude, only stubborn, because she nearly blundered with a position similar to this one:

If my rook were one square to the right, I could have put the king in check, forced it in front of the rook, put the king in check again, and taken the rook with my rook protected by the king. I was just trying to make an oppurtunity and seize it.  If it were against someone on chess.com, however, I would call  dray, but being a state tournament, I tried to squeze every drop of oppurtunity out of the game.

Kasparov "nearly blundered" against Judit Polgar once. He realized it at the last second, and moved his piece to a different square instead.

Replay later showed that Kasparov's hand had infact let go of his piece for a fraction of a second. But Polgar was brand new to the Grandmaster chess scene, and did not call Kasparov, (then world champion,) on this.