Thursday, August 9, 2012

FIDE Laws of Chess - Article 8

Article 8 deals with the recording of moves, and in my experience, is one area where an arbiter is likely to be called upon to make a number of rulings.
At the the meeting in Lausanne there wasn't a big discussion on this section, although there is one big proposal that will be voted on in Istanbul.
One issue that did come up was that of legibility, as the 8.1 requires a player to write 'legibly'. In the end we decided it was up to individual arbiters to make there own judgement, using the obvious test of being able to reconstruct a game with the minimum of assistance. This of course may result in the forfeiture of vast numbers of chess players, but I have never seen a player punished for poor handwriting yet.
There was a proposal to treat players with a disability differently from players who cannot score for other reasons (eg religion), and this will be voted on at RTRC meeting.
8.3 states that the scoresheets belong to the tournament organisers. This isn't being changed, but it is worth noting I had a dispute with a player at this years Doeberl Cup who refused to turn in his scoresheet, and then disputed this rule, claiming it was over ridden by 'the laws of Australia'. In the end I walked away from this argument, but sorted it out at a later stage.
8.4 is the section that specifies when you can stop recording. You can stop recording when you have less than 5 minutes before the next (or final) time control, and if you have less than 30s increment. The USCF is proposing a change to this rule, to allow both players to stop recording, when one player is below this limit. I will vote against this proposal,as one of the requirements of playing tournament chess is to keep a record of the game, if you are able to. The other problem is: What happens if a player is below 5 minutes but continues to record, can the second player stop? (Feel free to think of other variants of this problem).
Otherwise everything remained unchanged, apart from a few language corrections.

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