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BGonline.org Forums
Illegal move will be corrected
Posted By: Steve Mellen In Response To: Illegal move will be corrected (Chiva Tafazzoli)
Date: Friday, 4 March 2011, at 12:52 a.m.
I actually think the question of whether kibitzers can call attention to an illegal move is non-trivial, by which I mean I am not sure that I disagree with the majority but I feel it merits discussion.
One concern is that a kibitzer might favor one player by pointing out only illegal moves that favor that player. While valid, this would not happen often enough to warrant silencing kibitzers altogether, in my opinion.
Another concern I would have is that I would only want a spectator speaking up during my match if an illegal play actually happened. I would not want someone loudly disrupting the game to say, "Hey, didn't he roll a 3-2" only to have all the other watchers shush him. I would not want someone disrupting the flow of the game to reach in and point out an illegal move before the opponent even had an opportunity to say anything. In practice, all of these things would happen and more.
Here is an analogy that I think is not entirely off base. Those who follow professional golf (I believe our Bill Riles is one) know that in recent years, there have been several controversies where players committed rule violations that escaped notice, but were later pointed out to officials by TV viewers. High-profile players have been disqualified after their round because someone noticed them commit an inadvertent violation on the 2nd hole and phoned it in to the PGA. I think this would strike many people as really weird, and I believe there has been quite a bit of discussion about the topic in the golf world, but the bottom line is that a major professional sport does in fact appear to operate on this basis. Is there anything worthy of discussion here? There is a school of thought that says the most important thing is to get it right, period.
P.S. Perhaps my analogy is more like the situation where a kibitzer alerts the director that two people are playing to the wrong score. I would accept this criticism, but since most everyone agrees that it is OK to tell the director in this scenario, why do we not worry that the kibitzer might alert the director only when correction of the error would favor his friend and not otherwise? And in a situation where both players AND the director/official monitor overlook an illegal play on the board, is it improper for a kibitzer to give the monitor a nudge before the next roll happens?
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