Correspondence Player Spends Three Weeks Calculating Exchange Sacrifice, Realizes Opponent Already Resigned

A correspondence player has spent three weeks verifying an exchange sacrifice on f6 and delivered it to an opponent who resigned nine days earlier, according to the archived game record.

The player, Andrew Prell, 44, filed his analysis on the eleventh of the month against a game the server had closed on the second. The record is not ambiguous. The resignation was posted at 19:41 and accepted automatically; Prell's reply, containing 35.Rxf6 and thirty-one lines of supporting variation, was posted at 08:12 and returned to him marked as correspondence to a finished game. He wrote it anyway. In correspondence, the move is the work, and the work had three weeks invested in it.

The line he built is real. After 34...Nf6, he had the sacrifice: 35.Rxf6 gxf6 36.Qh6, with the rook to follow to g1 and the queen sitting on the dark squares where the black king's shelter used to be. He filled eleven pages with it. He checked the g-file clearance twice, checked that the recapture gxf6 was forced rather than 35...Nh5, checked that the knight could not simply return. Every move in the sequence is legal. None of them had a recipient.

Tessa Fenn, who shares the flat, noticed the resignation email on the second and said nothing for nine days, a silence she has since described as the most expensive thing she has ever not done. She watched him come back to the notebook each evening with a fresh pencil. "He had that face on," she said. "The one where he's already seen the losing defence and is annoyed at himself for finding it."

Prell ran the finished line through his own engine afterward, at depth 40. It prefers 35.Ne4 and gives the sacrifice −0.72. A commenter on the forum where he posted the analysis replied with nothing but +0.62, to two decimal places, which is the correct number of decimal places and none of the correct number of facts. The number is not the finding here. −0.72 is a judgement about a position between two players; Prell was alone at a desk, and the practical consequence he missed was simpler than any evaluation: his rook had nowhere to land, because the game it belonged to had already been scored, entered in the standings, and archived with a result.

Inez Gable, who rules on these matters with a confidence the record does not always support, was asked whether a resignation can be withdrawn by an addressee who has not opened it. "A resignation takes effect when it is posted, not when it is read," she said. "Otherwise correspondence chess would be conducted by people who check their mail."

Celine's Field Corrections retires a claim this week: the standing assertion that correspondence players have unlimited time. They have unlimited time to calculate and none at all to notice.

The opponent, reached through the club, gave his reason in two lines: 34.Ne5 had trapped his queen, and he had seen it before Prell did. The pages are on the desk anyway. The g-file is still open, the knight is still on f6, and Prell has already opened a second file against a new opponent where the same structure is arriving by a different move order.