An Arbiter's Notebook by Geurt Gijssen More Events in Elista In my previous Notebook I promised to tell more about the Olympiad in Elista. I have already mentioned something about the time limit and the use of the DGT clocks. In each round 328 games were played. This meant that we had to program 328 clocks every day. We played according to the Fischer modus, 40 moves in 100 minutes, and then 20 moves in 50 minutes and 10 minutes for the remaining moves, with an addition of 30 seconds after each move. It would often happen that after about 6 hours playing time an arbiter, a captain or a player would come to me and inform me that the above mentioned 10 minutes for the third time control had not been added. This was easy to correct, but I was very unhappy that some of the arbiters made mistakes when programming the clock. And several times I even blamed them for this. But, in round 5 the captain of the Portuguese team came to me and informed, that he had discovered several years ago that the DGT clock had a bug. I looked into this with some people from the DGT Company who were present in Elista. They had to admit that he was completely right. I hope that arbiters will read the following paragraph very carefully, an official statement issued by DGT, on how to avoid this bug. "We had report of a bug in the setting of the Fischer Tournament methods. It appears only in option 25 "Fischer" tournament Manual set, (Option 22 for DGT+) and only when the manual setting is skipped by pressing the Start/Stop button. The following happens: When in option 25 ("Fischer" Tournament up to 4 periods) (option 22 for DGT+) the manual entry of the settings is skipped by pressing the Start/Stop button at the first flashing digit, the setting of the third and fourth period gets lost and is set to zero. Solution: When the above option is used with more than 2 periods, always step through all parameters by pressing OK for every figure." There were a few strange incidents. A few times a player stopped his own clock and started his opponents's clock, without making a move. There was one case when a member of the Brazilian women's team did this, because her opponent did not write down the moves. She wanted to force her opponent to write the moves on her own time. Her opponent did this, but then the problem arose that the clock had counted one move more than they actually had played. I do not remember how many times I told the players that in case of an incident to stop the clocks and to summon the arbiter. Especially with the Fischer control, it is a must. I would like to tell you about the meetings of the Rules Committee... The first meeting of the Rules Committee started with a moment of silence in the memory of Carlos Falcon, who passed away. Carlos was a member of the Rules Committee and had acted as an arbiter and organiser of chess tournaments. He was my Deputy Arbiter in the Kasparov- Karpov Match, New York and Lyon 1990. I also worked with him in the World Cup Tournament, Barcelona 1989, which he organised. He was a very precise man, with a good eye for details and always very quiet. His tournament reports were masterpieces. In the last letter I received from him, he discussed some changes. Really I felt very sad, when Grandmaster Ljubojevic called me and informed me that Carlos had passed away. The Dutch Chess Federation had submitted a question about capturing the king in blitz chess. Readers of The Chess Cafe will recall that I had already discussed in a previous Arbiter's Notebook what to do when the king is captured. The committee had a lengthy discussion about the matter and whether this should be considered to be an illegal move or not. There were different opinions in the Rules Committee and also different interpretations of this rule. The final conclusion was not to take any decision and not to change the rules or the wording of the rules before the year 2000. Since there are no ratings for Blitz games so far, these decisions will still remain in the hands of the arbiter of each tournament, provided it is announced in advance what the rule in this specific tournament will be. The blitz rules, as published by FIDE, may be used as a guideline. In my September column I answered a question of Mr. Damien Andre from Belgium. He explained that he had some problems with the symbol "=" to indicate an offer of a draw, because in his analyses he likes to use the same symbol when the position is equal. I discussed this in the Rules Committee and the Committee decided to stay with the symbol, as it is easy to use some other symbol in the analyses. In the meantime I have spoken with the editor of "Chess Informant" about this and he promised to think about it. Readers may remember the case of GM Epishin concerning the rating of a game when a ruling was made pursuant to USCF rules that conflicted with the FIDE Laws of Chess. The committee stated that this is not an issue for the Rules Committee, but for the Qualification Commission. I spoke with the Chairman of this Commission, who told me that it was impossible to rule on this in Elista, because he had not received all the details. There had been an incident in the World Team Championship in Lucerne 1997 where a claim was made for a draw in a position that was not absolutely clear (King + Rook against King + Bishop). The Chief Arbiter of this event, Mr. Horst Metzing of Germany, had asked to have a list of positions that could be considered to be draws. The Rules Committee rejected the idea of creating such a list. How this and similar incidents have been solved could be published and circulated by FIDE in its Forum letters. I would like to make an observation. Even when we have a lot of these cases, no compilation can be considered as the definitive list of drawn positions. Some arbiters will allow the claim, some will postpone the decision. The latter group likes to see what is going on the chessboard and based on this observation, make a decision. I repeat my advice: The arbiter should in 99% of the cases postpone the decision. And as you know, even after a flag falls he may still declare the game drawn. A player has the right to claim a draw during the last phase of a game when all remaining moves must be done in a limited time. But he may only claim, when he has less than 2 minutes on his clock. There was a proposal that a player may claim a draw even before there are less than 2 minutes left on his clock for the remaining moves, provided that he is then considered to have less than two minutes on the clock thereafter. The committee did not approve this proposal. The same result happened with another proposal: The question whether a player whose opponent has made an illegal move should be penalized for not noticing the illegal move was not approved. A proposal of IA Keles of Turkey was very interesting. It is an addition to the Rules of Blitz games. If a player has less than one minute left on his clock, he may claim a draw before his flag falls. He shall stop the clocks and summon the arbiter. If the arbiter is satisfied that it his opponent cannot to win by normal means, then he shall declare the game drawn. Otherwise the claimant loses the game. In the year 2000 the Rules Committee shall discuss this proposal. After the Olympiad I was, of course, quite curious, what journalists would write about the Olympiad. Let me start by admitting that at the beginning of the Olympiad the situation for journalists was far from ideal. But after a few rounds they could reasonably do their job. The Chess Palace had a satisfactory pressroom and I understood that it was possible to transmit articles to the newspapers from here. After a long discussion with the organizers the main concerns of the journalists were addressed. Generally the journalists who were present in Elista wrote positively about the Olympiad, the organisers and the inhabitants of Kalmykia. I have spoken with many players after the Olympiad as well, and with only one exception, everyone was positive. In my opinion it is quite remarkable that journalists, who were not present, but followed the Olympiad at home on the Internet - and I have the impression, that more and more chess journalists are doing their job in this way - were quite negative about the Olympiad. The fact that journalists are following chess tournament via the Internet and not in person in the tournament hall is a cause for concern. I have already noticed more than once that incidents in the playing hall have not been properly reported in the newspapers...