2001-02-25 - 23:59:47

Decide in haste, repent at leisure

(NYS Scholastic, Day Two)

Okay, I have an admission to make: this entry is being written almost two weeks after the fact. That's how far behind I am. And the reason that I am so far behind, to some extent, is because of what happened on this day. I got blindsided by something, and I was too tired to deal with it properly. It knocked the wind out of me, and I feel that I am still recovering from it. In some ways I'm glad that it's two weeks later, because the shock of immediacy has worn off and I have a little more perspective on the incident.

Anyway, this day began just like the day before - I got up early and went to the tournament site. This was going to be the last day of the event, and I made the (very wrong) assumption that it was going to be an easier day because it was shorter. I told Lily to expect me for dinner. Ah, if only I had known.

What I hadn't counted on was that because it was the last day, it was the decisive day, and everyone's nerves would be on edge.

I earlier mentioned that two years before this tournament broken local attendance records with about 500 kids. This year they easily topped that with about 680. While bigger is usually better, in this case it strained the resources of the hotel, and the chief tournament director, and the organizer, to the breaking point. The hotel had a severe overpopulation problem with all the kids, parents and coaches milling about.

On this last day there was a side event for the very youngest kids in another one of the ballrooms, so the woman who was the chief TD in the largest ballroom was assigned to direct that. That meant that the senior tournament direct in the largest ballroom was... yours truly, Mr. Hamster.

This was not an honor I had coveted, but the plain fact that the other four guys assigned as directors had very little experience. I hadn’t had that much myself, but I still knew the rules better than any of the others.

At the start of the first round of the day I had a moment of raw panic. I stepped in front of the microphone at the front of the room and gave the announcement to start play. I then looked around and saw that I WAS THE ONLY DIRECTOR IN A ROOM WITH 450 YOUNGSTERS!! Where the hell was everyone else????

Thankfully the other guys showed up a minute or two later, much to my relief.

This gave me a moment to reflect that I was in a room with over 400 children, aged 6 to 13, and they all were quietly playing chess. It's a frigging miracle!!

Before I talk about what was, unfortunately, the defining incident of the day for me, there were some other things that I observed earlier.

Some of the younger kids playing on the bottom boards obviously could barely play chess. A couple of them practically needed a director standing over them to keep them playing. The trouble with the later rounds is that these novice kids are now playing each other. Hilarity ensues.

One little boy started to cry. I looked at his position - he had been winning, now he was going to have to fight for a draw. It was a tough break - but he wasn't lost yet! I tried to get him calmed down, but he was obviously very, very tired and cranky. I'd get him to slow down and take a deep breath, and then he'd look at the board and start crying again. Finally, I took him out to talk to his mother and she finally got him under control enough to finish the game.

On another board in this section a little boy and a little girl were playing. She was obviously whupping him. She made a move that put his king in check, and he couldn't move out of the way.

"It's mate?" He asked.

The little girl gave him a bored look. "No it's not," she replied.

The fact of the matter is that there is a special pawn move you can make in certain situations called en passant, and it was the only way for the boy to save his king, however he stood there just looking at the board. It was plain had no idea what to do. Some helpful little boy at another board piped up and said "en passant!" And was immediately shushed. It's totally illegal to give advice to someone playing. Still, the little boy stood there, looking at the position.

I pieced together what happened later. After standing at the board for a while with puzzled look on his face, he went out to the lobby and started asking people what en passant was and finally someone told him. He then went back inside the tournament room and made the saving move and the game continued.

All of this was finally brought to my attention after the game was over and had been declared a draw. At that point it was too late to do anything. I don't think that the little boy MEANT to cheat, but that was the net effect.

Before the start of the final round, I saw a little boy I knew enter the slowly-filling tournament hall looking very distraught. He was the son of one of the local chess tournament promoters and he seemed on the verge of tears.

Apparently he'd lost one of the black pawns from his chess set and was very upset about it. This is hardly the end of the world: kids are ALWAYS misplacing pieces. After any given round you can always find dozens of them in the tournament room. I finally found an extra black pawn for him to use, but he got even more upset - it didn’t MATCH the rest of his set!

At this point I thought he was being kind of overdramatic. As gently as I could I explained that the unmatched pawn was good enough for now and what he should concentrate on was calming down and playing a good game.

At this point he finally burst into tears. "You don't UNDERSTAND! If I don’t find the pawn my father won't let me PLAY!!"

I must have looked at him in utter astonishment. Then, as if to confirm, his father came storming into the room, yelling at the kid that he was going to be withdrawn from the tournament if he didn't find the missing piece.

Whoa. I immediately stepped back. This was obviously something that was between the kid and his father and I did not want to get stuck in the middle.

I looked over at the kid's board after the round started, and he was playing with the unmatched pawn. Obviously his father had relented. Still the boy wound up losing the game and finishing out of the prizes. He was so upset I'm surprised he could play at all.

Okay, now we get to the point where I practically fucked up the tournament all by myself. Everyone else here seems to think I'm being too hard on myself, but you can make your own decision about that.

As the round was winding down, I was called over to a board in the middle of the room by one of the other, less experienced directors. Apparently there was a dispute involving the "touch move" rule.

The rules of chess state that if you touch a piece, you have to move it. This is especially important in games involving young players because they'd touch EVERYTHING if they were allowed to.

Boy A had just made a game-winning move that would win his opponent's queen. Boy B claimed that Boy A had touched another piece first. I asked the director for more information and he said that at first Boy A denied the whole thing, but then began to amend his story. He said that he MIGHT have touched the other piece first, then he said that he just might have brushed against it.

What it seemed to me at the time was that the kid had touched the piece, and couldn't get his story straight. So I told him he had to move the piece he touched originally. Miserably, he made the move and when I looked over that the board a could of minutes later they were packing up. Boy A had lost just a couple of moves after the game resumed.

Okay. As a director I made a number of mistakes in that ruling, and I can only attribute it to being very, very tired. It was an important game, and I should have taken my time before making a decision. I had no idea how seriously everyone was going to take the game, but I certainly found out soon enough.

What I didn’t realize at the time that the situation simply boiled down to a he says/he says situation, one kid's word against another. In the absence of any witnesses (and there weren't any) you really can't make a ruling so the situation on the board stands: Boy A should have been allowed to win Boy B's queen. However, I only found out about this after the fact.

The shit started hitting the fan pretty shortly after that. Boy A's parents pigeon-holed me a few minutes later, saying that the ruling was totally unfair and that their son was utterly heartbroken and wanted to give up chess completely. They also said that they were going to complain to the U.S. Chess Federation and take the case "as high as it will go."

Swell. Notice the nice combination of threats and guilt-tripping.

I went off to where the chief tournament directors were working. They were sequestered in a closet - literally. The chief directors were bent over their computers in a cramped little room full of coat racks and other things the hotel wasn't using at the minute. I outlined to one of the senior directors, a woman with experience directing international events and she confirmed that I had made the wrong call.

I'm trying to remember the exact chronology of events, but my memory is murky, probably because I was so tired. I was still trying to direct in the big ballroom, and the parents of Boy A began besieging the chief directors, who had plenty of other things to do.

I let the chief director know that it was perfectly okay with me if she reversed my call. She then asked if I could find Boy B and reconstruct the situation.

I went wandering around the lobby outside the ballroom, and damn my luck if I didn’t find Boy B. I brought him back to the directors room and then Boy A, Boy B and the chief director set up the position in question.

She started asking all the questions I SHOULD have asked when the original dispute occurred and she discovered that the stories of the two boys varied widely. Boy B said that Boy A had clearly put his hand on the piece, while Boy A said that he had, at best, brushed it with his elbow. Boy A's story still seemed kind of fishy because it would have been hard for him to even go near the piece in question since it was on the other side of the board from the knight he eventually moved.

It was now plain that one of the boys was flat out lying, but there was no way to prove which. Maybe both of them were lying! I didn’t consider Boy B very trustworthy, but Boy A kept changing his story and he looked shifty and guilty as hell, or was it merely diffident?? There were also elements of Boy B's story that seemed to be changing, but I was too bleary to catch them.

The director ruled that the game should continue from the disputed point, but she HINTED STRONGLY that it would be nice if Boy A offered Boy B a draw, even though he was clearly winning now. He reluctantly did so, and the game was now declared a draw. The parents of Boy A now seemed to be satisfied, even if Boy B looks kind of baffled.

It was decided that the situation should be explained to the parents/coach of Boy B and I volunteered to do the job since I was the primary architect of the screw-up.

Boy B led me through the hotel to the front lobby where his father was dozing in one of the comfy chairs near the front desk. I explained the situation to him as cogently as I could, stressing that this was my fault because I had made a bad call, and that in this case a draw was perhaps the best outcome. If I had made the correct call at the beginning, Boy B would have gotten no points at all.

He seemed to accept this explanation with equanimity, and so I went back to the ballroom to continue to direct, or at least try to. I felt like an utter idiot. Well, at least the matter was resolved, or so I thought.

A few minutes later I was behind the directors table when the father of Boy B strode up. In the last half hour he'd managed to work himself up into a good head of steam, thinking about the injustice that had been dealt his son. He wanted to talk to the chief director, NOW.

The tournament was wrapping up. There were six sections of the tournament, involving 700 players, and all they all needed to have their final results tallied and the trophies awarded. I had been put at that table to answer questions and keep people AWAY from the organizer and the director while they worked out the final standings. I repeated what I told him before, that I had made a bad ruling earlier and that what was worked out was probably fairest for all concerned.

That wasn't good enough for him, he had some points he wanted to make. When the ref made a bad call in a baseball game, they didn't play the game over, did they? Why should chess be any different? And so on. And as he began to make his points and how he was GOING to see the chief director he began to get LOUDER and LOUDER and he started talking faster and faster and I couldn't get a word in.

It felt like all conversation in the atrium had stopped and everyone was looking at us as the volume of his monologue increased. I became aware of how much bigger this man was than me. He seemed to be stooping just to speak to me.

In the foggy recesses of my brain it occurred to me that this man was making a scene on purpose so that I'd be forced to let him in to see the organizer. Even though he was loud and he sounded angry, he did not seem out of control. This was a man who knew how to use persuasive argument to get what he wanted. It seemed as if he was orating like an old-time gospel preacher, right in my face.

I suppose it was because I was tired, bone tired, and my blood sugar was high. Suddenly I was back in fourth grade and the teacher was yelling at me, or I was at summer camp and one of the councilors was dressing me down in front of the other kids. I had no comeback to any of the things he was saying. My eyes must have been getting wider and wider as he continued his tirade.

All I wanted to do was make him stop. So I scampered inside and interrupted the organizer and the chief director, but any thing I had to say was pointless because he came in right behind me.

There followed a very awkward half hour or so as the father of Boy B attempted to use the arguments that he had been using on me to change the judgement on the game. The organizer and the chief TD didn't seem to be arguing with him, just sort of passively resisting him. They managed to put him off for a while so they could finish the other sections.

Again, I got the impression that there was something wrong here. These were people with a vast amount of experience running chess tournaments and they were just letting this guy go on and on. What it seemed like to be was that whoever complained the loudest the latest would have the judgement go his way.

If I'd been thinking more clearly, it would have occurred to him that the analogies he was using were false, that chess ISN'T like baseball and football and that bad calls are occasionally overturned after the game is over. Once my head was clear I was able to think of two or three historical cases to support that argument.

It was like I was in some sort of horrible nightmare. People were milling around outside waiting for the final results, which were being held up by this dispute. I left the directors room to get some fresh air and I was astounded and annoyed to find the Chess Asshole waiting there to talk to me.

What the hell was he doing there? He lived about 40 minutes from the tournament site. It's not like he was a scholastic player or anything. Was he stalking me or something??

He wanted to talk with me about some analysis I'd published on a game of his, about how I was wrong on that variation and this move and whatnot. I told was having a very, very bad day and this was the last thing I was in the mood for. He insisted, and then I got nasty and told him to just go away. This obviously pissed him off, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to find a place to hide. I was really sick of having to deal with him in any way.

Eventually, I went back in the tournament director's room, and they were STILL arguing in circles about the damned game. However, outside the room an ugly crowd of parents and coaches was forming. A lot of them had busses and planes to catch and they wanted the results NOW. One of them even barged into the directors' room, saying that everyone was leaving if they didn’t get results in 30 seconds.

Holy shit, a chess mutiny all caused by me! Someone kill me now!

To my surprise, the organizer the directors decided that the draw would stand and that the father of Boy B could take it up with the US Chess Federation if he didn't like it. He wasn't pleased, but he didn’t seem really angry.

After that, I helped to finish up the tournament and hand out the trophies. I felt like the ass of all asses. A little miffed, the organizer pointed out to me a flyer he'd made for floor directors about making hasty decisions. To paraphrase: "It's better to take your time and call in a more experienced director than make a wrong decision and spend the rest of the tournament dodging angry parents." For fuck's sake, why hadn’t someone given me this flyer before the tournament started???

I must have look utterly devastated. The chief director took me aside and said that she wasn't mad at me, which made me feel both better and worse. I respected her and was glad she wasn't mad at me, but she had such a reputation as a sharp-tongued, hard-headed woman that I felt I must have presented a very pitiful spectacle for her to feel compelled to comfort me.

There was one good thing about this day: it eventually ended. I got my check and headed home.