If you're talking about this game (http://www.chess.com/livechess/game.html?id=46491769), I'm afraid that your opponent does have mating material. According to FIDE rules, if a helpmate is possible, then mating material exists. Your opponent may just have a knight and a king, but that pawn you have makes a big difference. It is possible (and I'm not saying that you would actually do this, it just needs to be possible) that you could promote that pawn to a bishop and allow the following position to occur:
Sorry, but your slight misunderstanding of the appropriate rules has cost you this game. The good news is that now you know better, and may avoid the same fate in future games.
He said white has NO PRACTICAL WINNING CHANCES.
Not necessarily no help mate, lad, but PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE- why would anyone want to help mate? Running a knight all over the board in hopes of a flag is disgraceful, disgusting and should be prevented.
beautiful necro.
FIDE rules say that when the flag falls, if any sequence of move can lead to checkmate of the player who ran out of time, then this player loses, other wise, it is draw. Defining insufficient mating material otherwise would be making possibly false assumption about positions that can occur and level of play of the palyer (and you can't prohibit/ ignore troll level of play).
For such situation with no practical winning chance, like you write with nice cap, FIDE has an other rule, which states that a player can call an arbiter and claim a draw if his or her opponent makes clearly no attempt to win the game on board.
This rule encompasses any attempt to flag your opponent, and requires an arbiter.
Just to give two extreme example where this rule would be hard to subsitute by a machine :
Two knights vs a King and a pawn engame : sometime a theoretical win, sometime a theoretical draw. How do you tell whether the knight player is trying to force mate (one of the hardest, if not the hardest, sometimes more than 50 moves), and not jut flagging his opponent?
Rook versus Knight : theoretical draw in many situation. Technically, if the knight player get chaeckmated, it's an help mate, yet the position is so hard to play it's worth to play it.
And then you got some rare position where the outcome differs from what we would naturally expect by knowing just the material on board.
If you're talking about this game (http://www.chess.com/livechess/game.html?id=46491769), I'm afraid that your opponent does have mating material. According to FIDE rules, if a helpmate is possible, then mating material exists. Your opponent may just have a knight and a king, but that pawn you have makes a big difference. It is possible (and I'm not saying that you would actually do this, it just needs to be possible) that you could promote that pawn to a bishop and allow the following position to occur:
Sorry, but your slight misunderstanding of the appropriate rules has cost you this game. The good news is that now you know better, and may avoid the same fate in future games.
He said white has NO PRACTICAL WINNING CHANCES.
Not necessarily no help mate, lad, but PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE- why would anyone want to help mate? Running a knight all over the board in hopes of a flag is disgraceful, disgusting and should be prevented.