Saturday, November 21, 2009

An unfortunate incident, and a difficult lesson learned for 10 year old Melissa Giblon

In round 10 for Girls Under 10, Melissa Giblon (CFC 1253 rating) was paired with white pieces against Nisan Ulosoy from Turkey (FIDE 1612 rating) and the pre-tournament #16 rated player out of 83 girls in this section.

We had predicted that Melissa's opponent would play the French Defence based on her games to date at this tournament. It was clear from her opponent’s earlier games that she knew the main line of 3.Nd2 very well until at least 15-20 moves, so we prepared with coach Artiom a different variation (5.f4) to try to get her opponent out of her comfort zone. Melissa played the opening very well. Amazingly, not a single piece or pawn was captured until move 27, when Melissa made a mistake to drop one pawn. However, her opponent did not appear to see how to make progress despite being up a pawn.

From moves 34-39, the girls repeated the same position three times, which is a draw. After Melissa made her 39th move, she raised her hand for the arbiter, the clock was stopped, and Melissa claimed a draw. Her opponent said it wasn’t “threefold repetition” because she had made a move to a different position in the middle of that sequence of moves. Melissa correctly said that it didn’t matter, the positions didn’t have be repeated on consecutive moves, just any three times during the game. Nevertheless, the arbiter declined Melissa’s claim of a draw, without any explanation.

The girls continued in a see-saw battle for a couple of more hours into an end game which should have been a draw, due opposite coloured bishops. However, the girls each got very low on time (Melissa had 4 minutes left, her opponent had 2 minutes left at one point, although they each later gained back a few more minutes), and Melissa made a mistake to let her opponent win one of her pawns, and then promote her extra pawn into a queen and checkmate her. At 5 hours and 15 minutes, this was longest game by far that Melissa has every played in her life.

After the game, I was entering the moves into Fritz, and it popped up a message about threefold repetition of the same position. I immediately asked Melissa what happened, so she told me about the incident. I rushed with Andrei to meet with the head arbiter before the one hour deadline had passed since the game had ended. They explained that Melissa’s draw was declined due to a technicality of the rules. When claiming a draw due to threefold repetition of the position, the player cannot make their move and then claim a draw (because it’s technically no longer their turn once they have moved). They must first write down their intended move, then stop the clock and call the arbiter to claim the draw. This is an obscure and very non-intuitive rule (having to claim a draw before it has actually happened) that I suspect most tournament players are not aware of. As well, the arbiter did not explain her decision at the time, because an arbiter is not allowed to explain the rules during the game; doing so in and of itself could give one of the players additional information that they did not already have and could be used later in the game, which could be considered an unfair advantage.

This outcome really is a shame, and Andrei and I told Melissa that in our hearts we know that she got a draw against a much higher-rated player (almost 400 points higher).

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