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BGonline.org Forums
Too Scary?--it doesn't matter
Posted By: phil simborg In Response To: Too Scary? (Dmitriy Obukhov)
Date: Wednesday, 30 March 2016, at 5:46 p.m.
Whether you play legal moves or illegal moves, a player who is a cheater can abuse the rules, and the only way to really penalize someone who is often making wrong moves to his advantage is to call the TD and have him decide how to handle it. He might warn the player; he might assign a proctor to the match; and if it is done too much, he might take stronger action.
Now, let's talk about a player who is not a cheater. Ed O'Laughlin, who I would trust with my last dime, but who has problems reading the dice and moving the checkers and makes too many wrong plays.
Again, regardless of whether you play legal moves or not, and regardless of whether he makes moves to his advantage or not, if it happens often, it is irritating, time consuming, and puts stress on his opponent to have to monitor his every move so closely.
When you have someone like this, again, I believe their should be penalties to make him play more cautiously, but I believe these penalties are difficult to put into the rules and could only be imposed by a tournament official.
A better solution is that when you have a cronic offender, the TD does something to stop it from being a problem.
Ed says he has trouble reading the dice. If I were the tournament director, I would require that when Ed is playing he must call out his roll verbally every time he rolls so that his opponent can correct him immediately if Ed sees the dice wrong. That is one solution. Another, if it is an important match like a semi-final at Nordic, is to assign a monitor for the match and it is his responsibility to see that legal moves are played, and the TD can empower him to make some penalty for clock adjustments or otherwise if he feels it is warranted.
As for "just going back to the ABT rules" about legal moves, one of the big problems with the rule was the affect on other things, like putting your own checker on the bar, and when you play with two pair of dice not being able to call your opponent on the illegal move until he picks up the dice. So there are other problems with that.
Bottom line, THE PLAYERS have the first responsibility to see when things are not going smoothly in the match and their job is NOT to try to solve the problem themselves, but to call the TD and let him decide how to make sure the match proceeds fairly...and he has many options at his disposal to make that happen.
In the Nordic situation, both players were guilty of doing things wrong and neither called the director until it got out of hand. Further, any spectator could have and should have called the director the first time he saw Ed make an illegal move and Costas correct it...that shouldn't happen and the spectator can and should call the director and it would have stopped immediately or the match would have been monitored. One would think that players as experienced as Ed and Costas should know better, but in the heat of a big match, things happen.
I am a strong believer that ALL IMPORTANT MATCHES SHOULD BE MONITORED by an official who makes sure there are legal moves; that the clock is handled properly, that the score is proper, and that all rules are being followed properly. If there is an infraction, the TD might give authority to the monitor to enact penalties on the spot if he believes the monitor is qualified, or he might instruct the monitor to call the TD when there is a problem. There is always one or two highly experienced players around to monitor important matches toward the end of the tournament, and for everyone's sake, spectators and players, why not make sure everything is run smoothly and fairly and take away the responsibility of the players to police each other?
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