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Devil's Advocate .. etc etc (Long)

Posted By: Colin Owen
Date: Tuesday, 3 March 2015, at 3:20 a.m.

In Response To: Devil's Advocate .. etc etc (Stick)

I don't think that it's true that when you play 'opponent decides' it always creates bad blood. With 'NLM' there were players big enough to accept that they had made a mistake, and took the consequences of it without bad feeling. Does it really reflect well upon our game if such players are becoming rarer? Should we continue to encourage the opposite stance?

Christian's suggestion of allowing the opponent to decide whether or not the repeat offender forfeits his turn suffers from the fact that losing a turn would be an illegal play in itself. But it's nonetheless an imaginative attempt to provide a suitable sanction for repeat offenders.

Most of the posters in this thread seem in agreement that repeated illegal plays are bad for the opponent, even those plays (a minority) that harm the equity of the player making them (in a LM setup). Those that considerably, perhaps dramatically, improve that players equity, however, have no sanctions against them - even in the absence of LM of course. The sanctions suggested in this thread have IMHO varied from token (minor time penalties) to wildly disproportionate (loss of point, gammon, match). All suffer from total arbitrariness. I also feel that a sanction that could not be applied across the board, ie only in clocked matches, is undesirable and would discourage some players from using clocks (when they have a choice).

IMHO after, say, two or three illegal plays in a match, the right to make the play SHOULD TRANSFER TO THE OPPONENT. I feel that this is both natural and fair. It is not arbitrary. Just because it would punish the offender more sometimes than at others does not make it so: his/her carelessness - or even dishonesty - created the situation. Anyone on the cusp of such a sanction would be much more careful. Perhaps a players allowance should be greater for longer matches, as per breaks during a match. Should such moves count in PR? Probably, but I don't really care. If the opponent carrying it out made an illegal play themselves, then the original offender would regain their right to make the play.

Of course, in the prevailing climate that you probably accurately describe, there would certainly be players who were not big enough to avoid feeling resentment at their opponent exercising their right to butcher their position - even if it were (nearly) always better than being defaulted (either directly, or after a time penalty) or even docked a point. Equally, in that climate, there would be opponents who were too afraid to carry it out. Was a waste of time suggesting it really (sorry).

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