And Now, For Something Completely Different...

In an earlier post, I mentioned, among other things, some of the silly games guests will play with each other. Some players never bother to resign, and that approach to sportsmanship has inspired a wide range of counter-measures, from adding time to the opponent's clock to letting one's own clock run almost all the way down before winning, to offering a draw an instant before giving checkmate. (The idea is to mate them before they succeed in accepting. My countermeasure on those occasions when I'm in the victim role and suspect my opponent is going to do that: hit the draw button when they're down to about half a second - it often works!)

As I mentioned in that previous post, ICC no longer lets guests add time to their opponents' clocks, while the other two options are ones I never found particularly attractive. As I like to play "bullet" chess (roughly, chess at a time control faster than three minutes per side for the whole game, with one minute per side the preferred form) as a way to unwind at the end of the day, I had to find an alternative solution, another way to make a statement in response to the never-resigners.

My solution was to take up 0 1 chess, in which the players begin with 10 seconds and are awarded an extra second after every move. This takes care of the adding-time problem, and I don't have to worry about my own clock running down while extending the entertainment experience. My goal was to keep the game going as long as possible, and after a while, I had it down to a fine art.

Indeed (are you reading this, Dave?), it became a quest. Just how many moves could I make a game last? To see my best - and most likely last - effort turned out (against a cooperative opponent - he had been on the receiving end before and decided to let me have my way from the start), you'll have to take a look at game 30 in my library on the Internet Chess Club. (Once you log in, whether on a registered account or as a guest, type "examine Initiative %30" [without the quotation marks] and start replaying the moves. Quickly.) It's not that I'm trying to be coy by not posting the game; rather, it's that reproducing it here would chase all my other posts into the archives!

I eagerly await reader reactions on this one.