4 ms·

There was the finals of The FIDE Chess Olympiad going on between India and Russia when this outage started. 2 Indian players lost connect to Chess.com at this t

• Aperocky 6y ago
  Why can't they have a rematch though? At least the Russian player should have a say if they wanted a rematch.
• tzs 6y ago
  I don't know how these events are conducted, but I'm assuming that it is not simply each player playing from home unsupervised. That would make it way too hard to prevent cheating. So I assume that there is a tournament official onsite at each player location watching, just like there would be for an in-person tournament. If that is the case, there are a couple of reasonable ways to handle this. One is to bring back something that used to be common in high level chess: the adjournment. This used to be common when most championships used time controls that were slow enough that you often would not finish the game in one play session. The way it worked is that at the end of the play session, the arbiter calls for an adjournment. When the player on the move decides their next move they write it down on a piece of paper rather than actually making it on the board, the move is sealed in an envelope which is kept by the arbiter, and play stops. When it is time to resume, the arbiter opens the envelope and plays the sealed moved on the board and starts the clocks. Both players are free to analyze as much as they want between play sessions, and can get outside help. For world championships, especially back when it was Fischer vs. Spassky or Korchnoi vs. Karpov and the match was serving as a proxy for the cold war, each player would have whole teams of top GMs to help analyze during an adjournment. The player who sealed the move has the advantage of knowing for certain what position will be on the board when the game resumes. On the other hand, the other player is going to be the first one to have the move after several GMs have pulled an all-nighter analyzing it for them so any inaccuracy in the sealed move is much more likely to be punished than it would have been without adjournment. Or get a freaking modem. Exchanging chess moves does not require high bandwidth, and most of these internet outages do not take out phone service. Do a mini-adjournment (seal the move, but keep the players on site), establish a dial-up connection between the playing sites, and then unseal the move and resume.
  • timsally 6y ago
    Generally in professional online tournaments there is not a tournament official onsite. Players are competing from their homes. Instead, tournaments require several Zoom sessions from multiple angles in an attempt to verify that the neither the player's computer nor a secondary device are being used to cheat. These Zoom sessions are monitored by tournament officials. On top of this, commercial chess websites have extensive anti-cheating measures that are used to analyze the games after the fact. For example, one of the major players has 5+ engineers and several strong chess players on their anti-cheating team. These teams have caught professional players cheating a surprising number of times. Being caught results in a lifetime ban from the chess website and there are often consequences for the player in real life as well. I don't really buy the idea of an adjournment. Are you supposed to have one every time a connection problem happens? Historically players knew at what point in the game an adjournment would happen. Having them happen at random throughout the game would change the whole dynamic. Your idea of a cellular connection as backup is an excellent one. I think the first commercial chess website to implement a turn key way for players to utilize one will see huge returns from that investment.
    • hinkley 6y ago
      Every time this conversation comes up, I'm reminded of a world-building subplot in one of Vernor Vinge's first books. Instead of banning computers in chess, let the competitor use a computer that they built themselves, so it's one augmented human versus another augmented human. In his world, there were no supercomputers elsewhere, so you didn't have to worry about covert channels phoning home to a much bigger computer. I suppose you could put everyone in a Faraday cage...
      • loneranger_11x 6y ago
        which book is this? and would you recommend?
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]