Saturday 20 April 2013

What would you rule?

An interesting but by no means unique situation came up at Street Chess today.
The diagrammed position was reached with both players having under 2 minutes on the clock, in a G/15m game. It was Blacks move and he played the obvious h1=Q. However in his haste he grabbed the wrong queen (a white one), placed it on the board, and pressed his clock. The player with the White pieces look confused, then said "Is this legal?" before pressing his opponents clock. At this point I (the arbiter) stepped in, stopped the clock, gave White an extra two minutes, reset the position to before the promotion, and asked Black to try again. Black correctly promoted and White resigned a few moves later.
But the question that was asked after the game was "What would happen if White said nothing, but instead moved the Queen away from the Black king and pressed the clock?" How would you rule is this is indeed  happened? Would it make a difference if you watching the game as opposed to being asked to make a ruling when you did not see what happened?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In such an instance, the black king should be immediately replaced with a white king, to complete the Spanish inquisition.

Anonymous said...

In this case, black made an 'additional' error of subsequently placing his king in check after this promotion so there's another case for an illegal move. Surely there are explicit rules of a promoting pawn to 'promote' to a piece of it's own choice but same colour. Can a promoting pawn remain a pawn?

Kevin Bonham said...

Actually had exactly this happen in a blitz game - opponent queened his pawn to my colour queen. I let him off with a draw but could have kept playing with "my" new queen and mated him. Or I could have claimed that as a result of his move I had mating material, and that his move was illegal (hence win to me).