Just the Rules: Your Opponent is the TD?!

Surprise, surprise, surprise! You find your board for round one. Your pieces take their assigned places on their squares. Your clock is set correctly. Your opponent appears at the board … and it’s the TD! What can you look forward to?

The TD Service Call

At some point your opponent may be called away to solve another player’s problem. The time it takes away from your game depends on how much of a puzzle they need to solve. Most TDs will stop the clock in your mutual contest (see rule 21E) to go off and engage in the fine art of rules enforcement. The more wood-pushers that attend the event, the greater the chances are that your TD will be called on to make a ruling. During their time out from your game you are allowed to keep on analyzing the position. Yep, that’s right, you get extra thinking time.

A knotty problem will probably take a long time for your TD-opponent to untangle. Your mutual stopped clock may impact the time it takes to finish your game. The longer it takes the tournament official to return to your contest to start the timer ticking, the greater are the chances that your game will be one of the last ones to finish. Add to that that, at the end of your game, there is the possibility that other chess warriors will need TD help with their own “flag-fall” claims. That may, in turn, impact the start of the next round. Your TD has a lot of duties to take care before the current round ends and the next one begins. Duties that will be difficult to attend to while they are pushing wood with you. Difficulties that may weigh on their mind.

There is a Claim Made in Your Game

Who deals with any claim — flag-fall, touch-move, illegal move, etc. — in your game? If your TD-opponent makes a ruling in that contest there is always the aura of bias, intended or not. How would you feel if they ruled in their own favor? While it is not always possible, someone else besides your TD-opponent needs to make the call on claims in your game. A spectator or a fellow event player (that happens to be certified) can often fill that role. A call to a special referee is also a good option.

Impartiality

And then there are your fellow gamesters that will cause your opponent — or you — anxiety. They may make a bias claim in the pairings: especially when it comes to those pairings impacting prizes. No one likes playing a game with a cloud hanging over it. A little sunshine can peek through the clouds if your TD-opponent doesn’t allow themselves to collect any prizes. Sometimes they even direct for free — or at least for a free entry.

The Bottom Line

Rest assured that all of the above does happen, but rarely. If a playing TD gets called away from a contest, that time out will probably be short. Your extra analysis moments will also be short, and probably not make any significant difference in the outcome of your game.

Most TDs are not willfully dishonest or biased in their pairings. In general, pairing programs do the grunt work in assigning those contests. TDs might make inadvertent mistakes. Intentional dishonesty will be rare

When playing TDs are backed into a corner and forced to make a call in their own game many of them, anecdotally, seem to bend over backwards to be overly fair. And don’t forget there is an appeals process — via rules 21H, 21I, 21J and 21L — at your disposal in case a playing TD drops the ball. Click here for a past “Just the Rules” column on rules 21H – 21J.

Be aware that without a TD-player combo many clubs would not exist.

It has been observed that many TDs that push wood at their own tournaments seem to traditionally lose rating points over the long haul. The rulebook disallows TDs to direct and play in national US Chess events: rule 21E again.

Want more? Past columns can be found here or by searching the Chess Life Online archives.
 

Plus, listen to Tim when he was a guest on the podcasts “One Move at a Time” and “The Chess Angle.”