New FQE rule

[Roman Sarrazin Gendron]

Re : Re: New FQE rule

How were the increments handled by the analogue clock?? What time settings were used for the analogue clock? Anybody know?

With an analogue clock, the time settings were : 2h/40 moves, and then 1h/mate, instead of 1h30/40 + 30 min/mate with 30s increment.

[Jonathan Berry]

Re: New FQE rule

The news of the demise of analogue clocks in Quebec,
together with the participation of 69-year-old Nona
Gaprindashvili in the WGM tournament at Paks, Hungary,
reminded me of ...

In 1987, Finnair organized a chess tour to what was then
the Soviet Union. We were well met by the chess society
in Leningrad, Moscow, and Tbilisi. As the, ah, guide of
the tour, I got to play Blitz against the former world
champion. In the first game, to everyone's surprise, I
won. Nona had her competitive side piqued and asked: "how
many games are we going to play? Six?" We played and she
won the five remaining games.

But I noticed a funny thing. We were playing with a
beautiful GARDE clock, made in East Germany. As a youth,
I had been given a GARDE clock, which was my companion
for several years. What I knew was that if you pushed the
button in a very particular way, accelerating it, the
opponent's clock would start fast:
tickticktick.tick.tick..tick..tick...tick
instead of the expected
tick...tick...tick...tick...tick...
Each tick represents an escapement, so by applying this
technique, one could speed up the opponent's demise. Well,
Nona's play was grand-masterful, but her handling of the
clock was at the very least masterful. I felt doubly
honoured, first that she would play me, and second that she
would find me a sufficient competitor to use this additional
weapon. No, I wasn't at all tempted to accuse her of cheating,
and I had never really mastered the technique, so if I
attempted the same thing, it might look like I was just
banging the clock, which would truly be a sign of poor
sportsmanship.

Just beside us, one of the group played Blitz with (Tamara?)
Djugashvili. We wondered, but did not ask aloud,
how closely she might have been related to the late dictator,
Joseph Stalin.

[David McTavish]

Re: New FQE rule

I remember a pic , of a very young and innocent Gaprindhashvili( or was that Nona?), from an old en passant from the late 70's that you hand-chose most probably, when she played a match for WCh vs Chirbidanidze. Looks can be deceiving?:)Justice is subjective to that Soviet school; skipping Greek lessons --in a recent and unrelated post you have a similar approach to semantics or word origins to a same-sectioned Globe and Mail page) or more accurately, Hegelian dialectics gone mad. Referents to higher authority were(/are to a new generation of slavs old-schooled egregidigously-- more on that later) a good recipe for survival. We also all remember the run-up pre-Polgar to the Womens WCh, the USSR Womens Ch., and the 'arbitrary' rulings in favour, as blantantly as overpressing a Garde, in favour of the Stalin-Botvinnik-Karpov chosen ones by the appropriate(life-empowering\destroying) Soviet ministers, esp. for the above-mentioned former world womens' champs (Gap and Chirb).That was a run-on sentence, I now realize.

[Jonathan Berry]

Re: New FQE rule

I remember a pic , of a very young and innocent Gaprindhashvili( or was that Nona?), from an old en passant from the late 70's....

If you remember the pic, it was probably Nana Ioseliani. But hey, David, where can I get some of that stuff? Or is it Gaprindhashvili?

[David McTavish]

Re: New FQE rule

If you remember the pic, it was probably Nana Ioseliani. But hey, David, where can I get some of that stuff? Or is it Gaprindhashvili?

I've misplaced my old EP's unfortunately; that pic was Ioseliani-- not to be confounded w/ a weak pawn. That other stuff, in correspondence, is measured by the gm:) And on that note, is it only players east of ontario that are familiar w/ Molson's? Sambuev plays better w/ incremental, or digital,
time controls. Ficzere's 40/90 min + 30 sec incr. w/ two rounds a day prob scares off high-calibre vets( w/ deflated rtgs) like yourself, esp. timetrouble 'addicts'. That's too fast, but saves on overhead(hotel) costs.