U.S. Tournament Basics

In order to play a tournament game, you should know all the rules of competition (check out the fifth edition of the USCF rulebook) and be familiar with chess etiquette (which I discuss later in this chapter). Tournament chess in the United States is certified and rated (meaning that everyone gets a numerical evaluation of his or her performance) by the USCF. Normally, the tournaments are run by a tournament director and require membership in the USCF and an entry fee. You can find all the information you need about the organization, as well as forms for becoming a member, on the USCF Web site at www.uschess.org. When you compete in a tournament, you should bring your own equipment: a chessboard, set, and clock (see Appendix B to find some good sources for this equipment).

U.S. tournaments are advertised in Chess Life, the monthly publication of the USCF, which is included with your membership dues and is available on the USCF Web site. Chess Life has a section that includes the upcoming events and the names and phone numbers of the tournament directors. This listing will look like Greek to you the first time you see one, because it has all sorts of codes and shorthand. If you’re a novice, call the director and tell him or her that you’re an unrated player and ask any questions you may have. Everyone was a beginner at some point, and these directors will take the time to show you the ropes.

Watching your time and rating high

You don’t need a chess clock in order to play an informal game of chess, but you do need one in order to play a tournament game. An analog chess clock has two faces (a digital one has two readouts) — one for each player. You depress a mechanism on your side of the clock to start your opponent’s clock. Black starts white’s clock at the beginning of the game, and after white moves, white stops his or her own while simultaneously starting black’s.

Depending upon the tournament, the length of time allocated (called the time control) for the game varies. Each player may have 90 minutes to make 30 moves, for example, or he or she may have two hours to make 50. If any player exceeds the time limit while failing to make the minimum number of moves, he or she forfeits the game. Such a forfeit (called a loss on time) is treated just like any other loss for rating purposes.

Ratings in chess are a measure of expected performance versus known opposition, and they fluctuate based on your results: wins, losses, and draws. Beginners get their initial ratings by playing in tournaments against people with established ratings. The ratings given by the international governing body in chess, called the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE, pronounced fee-day), are sometimes referred to as Elo ratings after one of the rating system’s prime developers, Arpad Elo.

The USCF uses a similar rating system, which is generally 50 to 70 points higher than the FIDE one. The FIDE system, however, doesn’t rate players below a certain skill level, and treats them as unrated. The USCF system divides the rating population into classes.

The average tournament player has a rating in the Class C range. This rating is actually fairly high if you take into account all chess players, not just the competitive sort, because tournament players tend to be quite serious about their chess. Casual players may be very strong, of course, but usually active tournament players tend to be the strongest in the country.

Sandbaggers

When high-fee, high-class prize tournaments became popular, some chess players tried to manipulate their own ratings. These players would intentionally lose rating points in low-cost events in order to play in a class below their true strength in the big-money tournaments — with the hope of defeating weaker competition and collecting relatively large cash prizes. This unethical practice is referred to as sandbagging. Calling a player a sandbagger is one of the worst chess-related insults!

The USCF class system

The USCF class system has led to the development of class prizes. This means that a typical Swiss system tournament (see the next section) offers cash prizes in each of the rating divisions, which allows the organizer to demand high entry fees. This setup can lead to a sort of ruthless competition, which is another reason to start out in clubs (see the first section in this chapter) or smaller events, where the competition is still fierce — but friendlier.

Familiarizing yourself with the types of tournaments

Generally speaking, tournament competition comes in three varieties: the Swiss system, round robin, and match. The Swiss system, or Swiss for short, is the most popular in the United States. Matches and round robin competitions are usually more expensive to organize.

Swiss system

Most weekend tournaments in the United States are run according to the rules of the Swiss system. The Swiss system orders all players by their rating (and ranks unrated players alphabetically) and splits the list in half. The top player of the top half is paired against the top player of the bottom half, and so on, until the bottom player of the top half is paired against the bottom player of the bottom half. In case of an uneven number of players, the bottom-most player is usually given a one-half point bye (which means they’re paired in the next round as if they’d made a draw, even though they didn’t play the game).

Winners get one point, draws score one-half point, and losers get zero points. In the next round, winners play winners, losers play losers, and so forth, following the same procedure of dividing the lists in half and pairing the people in the two halves accordingly.

Gradually, you begin to play players of your approximate strength, because — in theory, anyway — you should be scoring roughly the same amount of points against the same kind of competition. The strongest players, or the players having the best tournament, are increasingly likely to play one another as the tournament goes on. The winner is the player who scores the greatest number of points.

The Swiss Gambit

Usually the first rounds of a tournament run under the Swiss system involve mismatches. Strong players play weaker players, especially early on in the tournament. Some players use a dubious strategy, called the Swiss Gambit, designed to avoid the toughest competition. This strategy involves allowing a draw with a weaker player, which gets the gambitor easier pairings (the winners play other winners, but the gambitor plays someone else who only drew) in the next few rounds. The hope is that in the later rounds, the strongest players will be playing each other — and the gambitor will sneak into the prize money by playing inferior competition.

This strategy, like any other designed to manipulate results, is just as likely to backfire as succeed. Who knows whether you’ll really get weaker pairings? In all cases, you should play your best.

Round robin

A round-robin tournament is one where everyone plays everyone else. These tournaments are regarded as a more accurate judge of a player’s performance because they don’t involve “lucky” pairing. Round-robin tournaments are used to determine most national championships and international tournaments. A drawback to this type of tournament is that it normally takes a longer period of time to complete and is therefore more expensive to produce.

An offshoot of the round robin is the Quad, where the tournament is divided into groups of four players of roughly equal strength, who then play one another. This type of system is popular in the United States because it’s inexpensive and avoids mismatches.

Match competition

Match competition isn’t technically tournament competition, because it involves only two players, but it’s another popular form of competition and can be rated. In a match, one player plays another for a predetermined number of games. This head-to-head competition is the purest method for determining the stronger player and is usually adopted in order to determine the world champion — or the world champion’s challenger.

Tournament Chess around the World

The main difference between national and international tournaments is that they play by two sets of rules. The basic rules of how to play are the same, of course, but the rules governing competition have some differences. In general, FIDE’s rules rely more on the discretion of the officials, called arbiters, to resolve any disputes or enforce claims. USCF rules are more involved and dictate specific actions in specific situations to a much greater degree. That’s why their rule book is so big and undergoes periodic revision.

Some international tournaments are by invitation only, but many Swiss events (see the preceding section) are open to anyone. You play by FIDE’s rules and for a FIDE rating, but otherwise the experience is similar to a U.S. tournament.

FIDE comprises the member nations of the world who pay dues and elect FIDE officials (the USCF is the official representative of the United States, for example). The organization also supervises the world championship and Chess Olympiads, where countries send teams to compete. As such, FIDE is responsible for awarding titles to an unlimited number of individual players, such as the following:

Going Long Distance: Correspondence Chess

Correspondence chess was originally played by sending postcards of chess moves through the mail (some people still call it “postal chess”). With the rise of the Internet, however, tournaments and competitions have also taken on a new form via e-mail and Web servers (see more on cyberchess in Chapter 16). Clearly, you have to know chess notation in order to participate (and I explain it in Chapter 17), but after you get the hang of it, you’ll find that correspondence chess is an excellent way to find opponents from outside your geographical area without leaving the comfort of your home.

To find opponents, you usually need to belong to an official postal organization. If you decide that snail mail isn’t your bag and prefer to play in cyberspace, you can hop online to hook up with an opponent. The USCF has a number of correspondence events, and Chess Life often has a column dedicated to postal chess. Magazines are even dedicated to this type of chess competition. Check out the following correspondence-chess-related Web sites to find more contact information to find an opponent:

The schism

In 1993, the FIDE world championship match was supposed to be between champion Russia’s Garry Kasparov and England’s Nigel Short, Kasparov’s rightful challenger. However, Kasparov wasn’t happy with the prize fund, so he ditched FIDE and helped found the Professional Chess Association (PCA).

The Kasparov-Short match was held under the sponsorship of the PCA, and FIDE was left with a sham match between two players whom Short had already defeated. Kasparov won the match convincingly and defended his title against Viswanathan Anand of India in 1995. The primary sponsor of the PCA was Intel — but after the 1995 match, Intel withdrew its support, and the PCA was history.

Negotiations for a reunification match between players with a claim to being champion continued to flounder. A non-FIDE-sanctioned match between Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik (see Chapter 19 for more on these two) in 2000 ended in Kasparov’s defeat. Although most people still consider Kasparov the world’s best player, he was thwarted in his attempts for a rematch.

These goings-on call into question a fundamental historical division in chess: Does the title of world champion belong to the titleholder, or to the organization that grants it?

Miss (or Mister) Manners: Tournament Etiquette

Chess is supposed to be fun, but quite often people take it very seriously. When you play Mr. or Ms. No Fun, you should know the do’s and don’ts of chess etiquette.

Chess etiquette is especially important in tournament chess. In a serious encounter, both players are staring at the board for hours at a time. Your hypersensitive opponent will surely notice a raised eyebrow, and a sneeze may cause someone to go into shock. Heaven forbid that you’d have a nervous tic or a habit of drumming your fingers or humming (mostly) to yourself. Chess players have complained about all these things and more.

You may properly address your opponent during the game only to offer a draw. If you have a complaint, the safest course of action is to bring it up to the tournament director. If the game is only for fun, use common sense — but above all, avoid distracting an opponent who’s thinking about a move.

Chess at these levels is an incredibly tense activity, and players get no physical release. Even otherwise placid individuals have been known to lose their cool over a real or imagined infraction. The best thing to do is just play for the fun of it, but even then it’s important to know the basics.

Knowing when to call your loss

Chess coaches regularly instruct beginners to never give up and always play out the game to checkmate. “No one ever wins by resigning,” they say. Although this point may be true, sometimes a loss is inevitable, and wasting your opponent’s time when you both know you’re doomed is just plain rude.

When to resign

If you’re hopelessly behind in material or face imminent checkmate, you may as well start another game. Over the course of your lifetime you may spend hours hoping to save one or two completely lost positions when instead you can be spending that time starting over from scratch. Moreover, you rarely — if ever — learn anything from these types of hopelessly lost positions. You’re much better off spending your time figuring out where you went wrong and then trying not to get into that mess again.

It’s possible that your opponents enjoy seeing you squirm, so they don’t mind continuing on. More likely, however, they’ll get annoyed that you don’t know when to resign and may refuse to play with you anymore. In fact, I quit going to one club in particular because the players there kept playing on in hopeless positions. I found myself driving home well after midnight week after week. If the members knew when to resign, I may have continued to play there.

The bottom line, however, is that resignation is a personal decision. You never resign just because your opponent wants you to, but you should resign when you objectively decide that you have no way to save the game. After the conclusion is inevitable, you may as well shake your opponent’s hand and go your merry way.

How to resign

Just as important as when to resign is how to resign. The formal method is not to throw your hands in the air and start crying, but to tip your king over on its side. This action is a universally recognized surrender. Then it’s important that you extend your hand to congratulate your opponent — this show of sportsmanship is a valued ritual in chess. It demonstrates that you have at least a touch of class.

Many players shake hands after the game but then undo the goodwill gesture by complaining that they should’ve, by all rights, won the game themselves. “If I’d just done this, instead of that, it was curtains for you,” they sometimes say. This talk is just childishness. Far more effective is to ask, “What would you have done if I’d played this instead of that?” This approach accomplishes a couple of things. First, it acknowledges that your opponent’s opinion, by virtue of the victory, may have some validity. Secondly, it allows you to listen to your opponent’s ideas. You’re much better off if you pick your opponent’s brain in this manner than try to explain away why you lost the game.

Sometimes both you and your opponent will spend considerable time discussing the game. Chess players call these post mortem sessions. Try to be respectful during these sessions and concentrate on learning — not proving a point. You’ll make many chess friends if you follow this advice.

Offering a draw

If you’ve determined that you can’t checkmate your opponent, and if you don’t think your opponent can checkmate you, you may want to offer a draw (or a tie). Offering a draw under any other circumstances may be considered annoying, and your opponent may report you to the tournament director. What’s worse is that the draw offer may be accepted or rejected, and you may still get scolded. In other words, if you make an improper draw offer, your opponent has the right to accept it and complain about it.

Under tournament conditions, you may make a draw offer only after you’ve made a move and before you’ve started your opponent’s clock. Never offer a draw to your opponent on his or her time. That behavior is a breach of etiquette, and repeated offenses may cause you to lose the game by forfeit.

If you make a draw offer without making a move, your opponent has the right to ask to see your move and then decide whether to accept or reject your offer. Repeated draw offers may be considered annoying, so wait until the position has changed substantially before making another offer.

If the position on the board is about to be repeated for the third time, you can claim a draw without asking. However, you must do so before making the move that would repeat the position for the third time, because the claim must be made on your own time and a tournament director must witness the move.

Did Kasparov cheat?

During one tournament game against Judit Polgar, Kasparov made his move and seemed to take his hand away from the piece for a split second. He then moved the piece to another square. The shocked Polgar didn’t make a claim but later indicated that she thought the champion had indeed taken his hand off of the piece. Kasparov denied doing so. However, the game was videotaped, and a careful review of the tape showed that Kasparov did in fact let go of the piece. Unfortunately, chess doesn’t have instant replays, and no protest was possible after the game was over. If even world champions break the rules, what hope do the rest of us have?

Being careful what you touch

One of the touchiest subjects in chess is the touch-move rule. This rule simply means that if you touch a piece, you must move it — if doing so is legal. If you touch a piece that has no legal move, you’re free to move any other piece. The move is considered complete when you take your hand off the piece.

Sometimes one player claims that the other touched a piece, and the second player denies doing so. If witnesses are nearby, the director may be able to make an informed decision. In the absence of witnesses, the claim generally isn’t upheld on the first complaint. If you accidentally bump a piece or knock one over, you should say, “I adjust” and replace the dislodged piece.

Furthering the touch-move rule, a frequent cause of complaints is the hand hover. The hand hover occurs when a player positions his or her hand over a piece and leaves it there. The hand hover is a distraction, and you shouldn’t do it — so goes the warning by José Capablanca (see Chapter 19 for more on that guy). You should never obscure your opponent’s sight of the board unless you’re in the act of moving, so don’t reach for a piece until you’ve decided to move it.

Straightening your pieces

Sometimes a pawn or a piece may not be resting completely on one square or another. You’re allowed to adjust that pawn or piece or even a whole bunch of them — but only if you do it on your time and if you warn your opponent first. The French phrase J’adoube (juh-doob; “I adjust”) is considered to be the proper warning, but it’s also proper to use the English translation.

As long as you’ve issued the J’adoube warning, the touch-move rule is temporarily waived. Keep in mind, however, that you can’t say “J’adoube” or “I adjust” after you’ve touched a piece!

Saving snacks for later

Generally, it’s considered improper to eat or drink anything at the chessboard except for water or coffee. Of course, if you’re playing in your own living room, all bets are off. The home team determines the ground rules in that case.

My worst experience with food at the chessboard came in my very first big tournament in New York. It was the last-round game, and whoever won would clinch a sizable prize. My opponent came to the board with a sloppy meatball sandwich and proceeded to get the sauce all over his hands. He then decided to adjust all my pieces, covering them with the sauce.

I was too inexperienced to complain and too young to shrug it off. Instead, I let my opponent’s rudeness affect my play, which is what my opponent had hoped would happen, and managed to lose rather badly. Needless to say, this scenario was a severe breach of chess etiquette, and I should’ve complained to an official at once.

The worst losers in chess history

Mike Fox and Richard James, in their delightful book The Even More Complete Chess Addict (published by Faber and Faber), nominate the following three candidates for the title of “worst loser in chess history.” In their own words: