World Chess Federation FIDE Arbiters' Commission
Case B: Losing on Time
This case occurred during the 2015 Commonwealth
Chess Championship, June 2015, in New Delhi, India.
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is credited with the quote: “The single biggest problem in
communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Note this quote does not actually blame a particular party, for example, either the speaker or the
listener. Effective communication is the mutual responsibility of all parties. This case is an unfortunate
example of things going wrong when communication is ineffective. One person was eventually
blamed the most, but with more effective communication, this case would have never even occurred.
The following text has been extracted from the original invitation for this event:
Note that the Time Control is 90 minutes + 30 seconds per move. There is no mention of 40 moves,
nor an extra 30 minutes after that, etc. The website also listed the Time Control in the same way.
However, both the invitation and the website also originally announced 10 rounds, which was
changed before the first round, apparently along with at least some of the round starting times.
Whenever things are changing, the need for effective communication increases, sometimes dramatically. All of these various changes set the stage for potential misinterpretation. According to one
article, before the start of the first round, the Chief Arbiter announced “Time control is 90 minutes +
30 seconds from move one and 30 minutes grace time”. The term “grace time” is not in the FIDE
English Laws of Chess, but is very commonly used in India. The term used in the Laws of Chess is
“default time”. In any case, Default Time is not part of Time Control. Regardless, and very unfortunately, it seems that many of the players understood this to mean that along with the other late
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