Zero start – crazy or practical?
I read with interest one article from New in Chess that the zero start rule from FIDE was created when an incident involving Anand vs Karpov match where the FIDE president Kirsan Illumzhinov was made to wait about half an hour for Karpov to arrive to officiate the event. No doubt the FIDE president was not happy to be embarassed at such a public event waiting for a player to arrive.
The latest players punished by the zero start rule are the Chinese Wang Yue and Li Chao. Read article here.
To me it seems pretty silly when the players are so near the playing area yet are penalised because they were not sitting at the table. Even Hou Yifan found out the hard way with a penalised game when she was actually in the tournament hall looking at some boards but was not sitting on her chair when the game started. Perhaps a loud speaker system announcing a count down before the game starts to avoid silly losses like these ? I can just imagine players dashing to their seats as if they are playing musical chairs.
I won’t debate about the merits of the zero start rule or otherwise but I’m interested to see what Malaysian chess enthusiast think. Take the poll on the right hand side of this blog.
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Zero start may be appropriate at the top level, but to apply it to amature chess players is absurd. The vast majority of us are self-sponsored and most of us need to travel to the venue via public transport (which isn’t always reliable) when overseas. Punishing a chess enthusiast, who invested time and money to play in a tournament, with a loss, just because he turned up 10 min late due to a traffic jam, defies all logic.
Regarding the recent forfeits, though, I am delighted to see that smokers are being punished (sadly not because they smoked, but rather because they ignored warnings that the games were about to start). In fact, they shouldn’t allow smoking at all during a chess game. Tobacco is a stimulant and it is ridiculous that players are allowed to smoke just before or during a game. Apart from gaining an unfair advantage through the use of a stimulant, smokers also disturb their non-smoking opponents with their smokey breaths. If I were FIDE president, I’d ban smoking immediately and permanently!
actually this is different from normal classical games, as the two players were late in this case to the 2nd _RAPID_ game.
the rapid games do _NOT_ have any firm start times, except for the first one of course
they should have been disqualified if they were late to the classical games, which they were not