by Geurt Gijssen I recently arbitrated at a chess tournament that included many “amateurs”. I made some observations and in some cases I had to take decisions and then explain them, although they seemed very obvious to me. Notation 1. There were some players who wrote the moves in their own scorebook, although official scoresheets were put on each board before the start of the round. In my opinion only scoresheets provided by the organiser may be used during the game. The reason is that a player who uses his own scoresheet may refuse to show this to the arbiter and even refuse to deliver it after the finish of the game. This means that some checks to some claims are impossible. To … [Read more...]