Monday 27 April 2009

When should you resign? - part 3

Last year I looked at when it was appropriate to resign (When should you Resign?). The flip side of this is what to do when your opponent refuses to resign. While I simply try and force a win as quickly as possible, some players have a different strategy. In an even earlier post on this topic, also called When should you Resign? , I highlighted the 'underpromotion' technique. I've probably also mentioned the "Force your opponent to wait" technique, which involves reaching a position where you have mate in 1, and then waiting until you've almost run out of time to execute it.
Added to this is the following game, which demonstrates the "Get as many queens as possible" strategy. This can be a double edged sword as one careless move can result in stalemate, and I know of a couple of inter-school competitions that banned multiple queening, to prevent this from happening. However white played the ending quite deftly to avoid this problem. Of course Black should have considered resigning around move 17, but clearly he wasn't of a mind to do so. White had numerous forced mates in the latter stages of the game, but I guess that was no longer the point of the exercise.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Shaun, I never new that there is such a problem. Will be more careful next time. Did you touch more common problem "when to offer a draw?"

Nick Beare said...

I prefer to resign my opponents king.

OzChess.com said...

As do I :)

Kevin Bonham said...

I think it's poor form for student comp organisers to ban multiple queening because of stalemates. After all if the child doesn't learn the painful way (by multiple queening and then stalemating) they may later go on to do it at a higher level. But I understand that for many school comp organisers it is tempting to ban the practice simply out of frustration at it happening so often!