Tournament/ League Play

Additional Rules

• All electrical equipment such as phones, laptops, smart watches, should be switched off or not taken into the playing room. If they are allowed in, they must usually placed within a bag or box and must not be on your person until the game has finished.

• Usually you are not allowed to talk or make excessive noises during matches, unless you need to ask questions to the arbiter/captain (person in charge) or your opponent.

• If you a touch one of your pieces then you have to move it if there is a legal move to be able to do so.

• If you touch one of your opponents pieces then you must take it, assuming there is a legal way to do so.

• Virtually all Tournament/League play is played with clocks or timers, and can be classed in the following ways

  1. Lightning - this is usually played with a buzzer on a timer. The buzzer is usually set off to go every 10 seconds, and moves must be made on the buzzer. These games are usually ungraded.

  2. Bullet - This is for games where each player gets up to 3 minutes each on the clock. These games are usually ungraded.

  3. Blitz - This is for games where each player gets more than 3 minutes, but no more than 10 minutes each on the clock.

  4. Rapid - This is for games where each player gets more than 10 minutes, but less than 60 minutes each on the clock.

  5. Standard - This is for games where each player gets 60 minutes or more on the clock.

• Now that the game has moved on to using digital clocks, it is possible to play using Fischer timings, which allow for additional time to be added to the clock after every move. In this situation, the classification of the game is placed with how much time a single person has to make 60 moves, so a Bullet game would either be a game with 3min + 0 secs a move, or 2min + 1 sec a move, or 1 min + 2 secs a move.

• When playing with clocks, on your move you must play your move and then press down the clock with the same hand that you moved the piece.

• For all standard play games you must write down all your moves. Unless you are playing with an increment of 30 seconds or more a move, you can stop writing your moves down when you get down to your last 5 minutes.

• Special cases

  1. In the case of playing blind players, they usually have a separate peg board. Touch move is when a peg is removed from the board, rather than when touching a piece, as they use the peg board to work out where all the pieces are. As they play their move on their peg board, they will speak their move so that their opponent can make the move on their own board, as well as speaking into a dictophone to record their moves instead of writing them down. They can also have special clocks that either allow the hands of the clock to be handled so they can feel how long is left on their clock, or with digital clocks it will speak and say how long is left.

  2. In the case where a player has no hands or no use of their hands, then they use the same thing they controlled the pieces to control the clock, which can include a second who is asked to move their piece and touch the clock for them, as well as writing any moves down.

Notation

Score sheets

Quickest Mates written down