Theory Specialist Devastated After Opponent Plays Move Five of Unprepared Sideline

The tab is cut from a blue plastic divider with scissors that were not made for plastic, and the ballpoint has pressed through it: POISONED PAWN (B97). Behind it sit sixty more, thickest where the binder's rings give out, each one a variation Arne Pell has taken to a depth his opponents decline to visit.

Pell, 54, has played the Najdorf Poisoned Pawn for eleven years. He has a prepared novelty on move fourteen of the 8...Qxb2 line, written out by hand in three colours, which he has never once reached in a rated game, because reaching it requires an opponent to cooperate for thirteen moves.

In round three of the club championship, playing Black in a 90+30, he did not get to move six. After 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6, Deniz Aksoy played 5.Bc4, and the clock transcript shows twenty-two minutes going on the fifth move of the game. Pell's answer, 5...e6, was legal, sensible and entirely unprepared for.

"I had the tab," Pell said afterwards, in the postmortem, with his score sheet flat on the table as if it were an exhibit. "I had the tab, the variation, the novelty, and he declined to take any of it."

Aksoy, 1745, was not being difficult. "I've been meaning to learn the Najdorf properly for two years," he said. "I got to move five and stopped. Bc4 was the last thing I remembered."

The binder had one page for the Sozin, a photocopy from a 1979 volume, and the page was wrong in a way that only matters if you spend twenty-two minutes discovering it. Pell asked the arbiter whether an opponent was obliged to signal that he was leaving theory. The arbiter, after a pause long enough to be recorded, declined to extend the touch-move rule to cover stationery.

In my margin: Article 4.3 governs a hand that has touched a piece. No article governs a hand that has opened a binder. Preparation is a practice, not a rule, and the Laws of Chess will not settle a grievance on your behalf.

The grievance did find a forum. Pell asked the standards board to have the game entered in the bulletin under B97, on the grounds that it had been prepared as B97. Inez Gable's ruling arrived the same evening: "The ECO code describes the moves that occurred, Mr. Pell, not the ones you were bracing for." Rejected, no appeal noted.

By the following morning the file existed anyway, in an envelope from Basil Holloway's shop: forty-one pages of Sozin, tabbed, eighteen dollars, and on its first line, 5...e6, the move already on the board. "It's the same file everybody has," Basil said. "The difference is mine is tabbed."

The club's message thread supplied the rest. Someone posted the position at move five, ran it to depth 24, and put +0.34 beside it, then explained that +0.34 meant the game had been lost before it began, which it does not mean. The practical consequence needed no decimals: Pell reached move thirty with four minutes and twelve seconds, played a rook move he later called "instant" in a drawn position, flagged, and signed the sheet with the pen he had used to write move five through the carbon.

Aksoy, who had fifty-one minutes at the same point, offered the draw that was declined. He then flagged nothing all evening.

The pairing sheet for round four went up at 7:10. Pell is Black again. The binder has a new tab, hand-lettered in the same ballpoint: SOZIN (B22). It currently holds one page, and the page is the printout, and the first line of the printout is the move he played with sixty-eight minutes still on his clock.