Why are chess players quitters?

Exactly, you've hit the nail on the head, my friend - play chess in the spirit of cricket. (This obviously might not mean anything to most of you, ha ha)

Oh, and I forgot to mention, in ball sports when a team is hopelessly behind, they often take their best players out of the game to avoid injury and preserve energy for future games. This also lets the less skilled players get some experience.

Also, even though prolonging the game can be rude, anyone resigning out of respect has done so for the wrong reason. People resign when the position is trivially won, the offense that may come about by continuing is merely a byproduct of the position's trivial nature.

New Zeland > England.

In chess, resigning not only saves time . . . it shows respect for one's opponent, admitting that their skill and intelligence makes it extremely unlikely that they can fail to win once the game has reached the state where the resignation is the most reasonable thing to do.

But that isn't simply your question. That is not nearly the whole of what your OP asks. This simplification as you call it is you removing every part of your OP that people can argue with, leaving only a bare unimportant fact. One that you say you want to measure but that can't be measured as I explained in my last post. Saying that you'll take what I said into account doesn't cut it. What are you going to do? Make up a number for that too?

I apologise to any anybody who is now going to look back through this thread. I just can't be bothered to repeat myself.

Come on now... That's a rather bold opinion after the thrashing we gave you in the recent world cup. Don't you think?

At high level competitive play, resignation is probably contingent to one's understanding of a hopeless position. From this perspective, I'm afraid that your OP's rhetoric debunks your own loaded question. Language can be tricky.

If I understand that my current position is hopeless, then it is perfectly logical to resign instead of wasting time playing a game in which I can't find a way around defeat, regardless of whether there are actually still drawing or winning chances because one can only count with one's own perception and understanding of the position (high level players' positional understanding is so good that it's actually correct most of the time anyway).

So it doesn't make sense to paint high level players as "quitters". In serious competitive play, players won't resign for no reason. If one is going to gamble that the outcome of a small percentage of top level games that ended with resignations was jeopardized by untimely resignation, it'd make more sense to support that assumption with a hypothetical "lack of skill" or "lack of confidence" argument instead of excessive indoctrination of 'etiquette'. Competitive play isn't that susceptible to 'etiquette' as you seem to assume.

At our poor performance level, where blunders are very more common, it can pay off to persevere in theoretically lost positions, especially in bullet or blitz. I've managed to win many games where I had more than enough of reasons to resign at chess.com. But at this level, we don't take chess all that seriously. So it's also not about being a "quitter"; other time priorities come into play.

yeah Daybreak, especially now that a dweeby cusser is trolling the thread too. next we will have someone say they have to keep saying ffs, because they only improve at chess by saying ffs all the time.

Because the OP is so fond of making sport analogies; I'd like to know what sport he personally plays, and why he feels compelled to keep trying in this sport, even after all hope of a respectable result is gone.

+1

Btw: Don't know if it has been mentioned yet, but in my youth I was taught that resigning a hopeless position is an act of politeness. The message to your opponent is: "I know that you are too strong to not win this".

Don't know if that has changed, I rarely play otb.

Resigning in the lost position is for not wasting time, of your own and, more importantly, of your opponent, Jesus fuckin Christ!

SINCERE APPRECIATION ON MY PART IS BEING EXPRESSED FOR YOUR ERUDITE AND ELOQUENT ANALYSIS. YOUR ENHANCED STATE OF MENTAL COGNITION IS EVIDENTLY DEMONSTRATED IN YOUR MEANINGFUL RESPONSE.

I find that this 'politeness' rhetoric as a justification for resignation doesn't make any sense, except in very extreme situations (where the losing player abuses of the time of the winning player in a clearly (mathematically) lost game where further moves are redundant and without instructional value of any sort for both parties).

Personally, my rationale to resign has nothing to do with 'politeness' or 'etiquette', it's a purely practical consideration.

I'll play for as long as I find interest in the game because I'm free to do so. I respect my opponent's right to do the same. I only resign when I have nothing to be gained from the game (or when I simply run out of patience or interest). And this is not just about the result's outcome, it's also about learning new things. For example, I might continue to play in a supposedly lost position just to see how the position progresses towards the final blow. This is rare because most of the time I can tell right away why I'm am losing or in a worst position. But in those rare situations in which it's less clear to me how I ended up in a very uncomfortable situation, I might keep playing just to see what happens.

I assume, when you talk about players abandoning their games, you're talking about players on chess sites like this one. Well, you have to consider there are a lot of young players on these sites, some of them aren't even teen age yet, and when they get frustrated (some of them anyway) they quit. It's like the little kid at the table faced with a pile of greens he doesn't like to eat, but his parents insist that he must eat it all -- so what does the kid do? He just sits there, does nothing, and stares down his plate.

Mehrdad Pahlevanzadeh, President of the Iran Chess Federation, has a proposal to have games played to completion:

http://en.chessbase.com/post/let-kings-decide-the-result-of-a-game-on-the-board

See also: http://en.chessbase.com/post/should-kings-really-decide-the-result-of-a-game-

These kinds of idea should be seriously considered and discussed and not dismissed out of hand like some people on this board have done.

Pahlevanzadeh: 'I like the idea of [Danish grandmaster] Bent Larsen who said "I'll resign when everybody in the room can understand why."'

'How many times you remember complaining about late resignation? And on the other hand how many times did you see a player resign premature in a game or even in drawish position, and sometimes worse in winning position? All of us know some examples in the top level!'

'I feel that arbiters are the only people who encourage fast results, fast resignation and even fast draws. I remember how arbiter always complain that players continue to play when the outcome is clear. I once heard an say to a grandmaster who continue to play a drawish position an hour after all other games had finished: "You are a grandmaster?! Shame on you! You should have accepted a draw one hour ago!"'

If the game is hopeless, why play on? Play any moves until one get mated? Chess lovers would not get access to beautiful games, and beautiful games collections if losers played patzers moves and self mate moves for the sake of finishing the game in mate.