Intermediate Player Struggles to Find 'Best Move' in Quiet Position, Decides to Play Randomly to Save Time

An intermediate player unable to find the best move in a quiet position on move 24 announced that he would play the rest of the game without evaluating anything.

The score sheet from round three of the weekend classical, 90 minutes plus a 30-second increment, records twenty-four moves and one annotation in the margin. The position was an Exchange Queen's Gambit Declined, ECO D35: Carlsbad structure, one pair of rooks traded, both light-squared bishops still on the board, and neither side eager to be the first to open a file. Nothing had happened for eleven moves, which is not the same as nothing being possible.

What he wanted was a move he could verify, a deflection, a loose piece, a forcing line where every reply is forced and he could stop thinking at move 30. There was no such line. He wrote four candidates on the reverse of his scoresheet: Ne5, Rac1, h3, Qc2. He could order them by preference. He could not order them by reason, and preference, as he put it afterwards, "is just a mood with a piece attached."

At move 24 he used thirty-one minutes. At move 25 he told his opponent, recorded in the opponent's own notes, that he was going to stop calculating and play whatever came to hand. His opponent said that was fine, and played on.

Moves 25 through 33 consumed eleven minutes and twenty seconds between them, most of it returned by the increment. The review he ran that night put that stretch between +0.11 and +0.36; he checked three engine versions, received three different ranges, and quoted the one that agreed with him. A commenter under his thread posted 24.Rac1 at +0.14 against 24.Ne5 at +0.11, depth 24, and concluded that the whole thirty-one minutes had bought him three hundredths of a pawn.

What the thirty-one minutes had not bought him was move 38. There, with 34 minutes on the clock, time he had saved by not thinking, he spent 31 of them choosing between two rook moves in a position his own engines later described, in three separate versions, as sitting between -0.14 and 0.00. The clock transcript shows his side going from 6:41 to 0.00 while his opponent made a single move. He lost on time at move 51, with the pieces still on the board.

"Tactics I can check," he said. "Quiet positions, I only have me."

Inez Gable, asked whether choosing moves by any method other than calculation breached a player's obligation to try, ruled: "The rules govern the move, not the mind behind it. A player may arrive at a legal move by any means, provided he spends his own time doing it. The clock is the referee." Basil Holloway, who keeps the equipment table, has since sold out of six-sided cubes held behind the counter. He would not say what is printed on the faces. He said the demand began in one evening and has not stopped.

Tessa Fenn, who lives with a player now narrating candidate moves through dinner, said the only question she has found safe is "how long was it."

He has not annotated round three. Asked for a short note for the club bulletin, he sent a link to his Black files instead.