Kudos to ICC

It's no secret that some people would rather quit than graciously resign their game. If you play chess online, you'd been there before. At ICC, you send a " request-win " to the moderators and wait for their reply. It could take a while, and usually they come back with something like " give it another week before you request a win. " Well, this is understandable since there are legitimate disconnections. I have been disconnected myself and my game resumed as soon as the time was propitious. Things start getting suspicious when your repeated request to " resume " a stored or adjourned game is declined by your opponent. Time to make your case again with the moderators.

However, in this example, I felt things were quite different. We did not experience a slow down of transmission ( you know, those little hiccups between the moves ). I had seen the very nice check on g4 earlier, but I thought I'd wait a bit until a bigger catch got caught in my net. True enough, after a few probing queen moves by white, I chased his queen one last time with 22...Rd8 and my opponent plunked his queen on e3. I,then, delivered the coup de grace 23...Nf6-g4+. Several quiet seconds went by, and then click! The opponent disconnected and the game went " stored. " I wasn't willing to be denied my win or wait for it over several days. It was obviously someone hightailing it out of a losing game. No Sir.

So, I messaged the moderators and made my case, arguing that the disconnection could not have occurred by happenstance at the moment when my opponent's king and queen were forked. The odds were just tremendous. In an hour, the game was adjudicated a win for black. I don't know what goes on behind closed doors at the ICC. Perhaps, they can tell the difference between an unintentional disconnection from an intentional one. Perhaps, it was just human instinct. I can imagine the moderators swamped with requests to adjudicate on a daily basis, and it could certainly lessen their workload if a clear message of intolerance was sent to quitters, like a suspension. Anyway, that's one story at the ICC.