Some players move their fingers when its opponent's move, others like to play with the pieces that are out of the board; others move constantly in their chairs fowards and backwards while others just cough you in the face during the hole game.
How do you handle on this situations to avoid getting tilt?
Does rules say something about it? Are you supposed to ask villain to stop, call the judge or something? Or you just punch him in the face and resign.
Or maybe start doing the same to him, to "equalize" the situation. I dont know.
I'm very interested in this topic. Next week i'll start a tournament and realized by checking the player's list theres gonna be a couple of this very annoying players.

Back in the day on Kasparovchess.com there was an article entitled something like "42 Ways to Annoy Your Opponent."
I'd be grateful if someone could find it, very funny stuff.

If your opponent does something that really annoys you then you can just ask him to stop. I def wouldn't try to get even.

I played a guy who moved all the captured pieces to a certain place and to a certain order. I annoyed him by hiding a few pieces. In one tournament I stared at people in their eyes when it was their move. Some guy did a ala tal and brought huge sunglasses.

once i got a hooker to hit on my opponent on the final round. He didnt show up for the game

You ask your opponent first and if he doesnt stop, you can call the referee.
Thats how you normally do it.
Its not allowed to disturb the opponent by any means, but there are a lot of things you can do anyway, at least once, like kicking him under the table "by mistake", move your chair and slam doors to make noises when he is thinking deeply, move the clock further away from his arm, move the table somewhat, "jadoube" his pieces (most effective when they were already placed correctly.) etc.

If you want to tilt me during a game, you can for instance:

- click your pen
- smell bad (sweat or bad breath are the most common) <-literally a dirty trick har har har
- be anal about the direction your knights are facing after every move

A list of downright illegal tricks include

- illegal moves, like making king-checks or turbo-boosting your pawn in a race in blitz endings
- writing down extra moves/leaving out moves from your score sheet to cause confusion among time control
- touching a piece then vehemently denying it happened (very common)
- knocking pieces over on purpose to create time trouble confusion

In my last OTB tourney, the player on the board next to me did something along those lines.
He was Black and his opponent had maybe 2 minutes left (they were using an analog clock) to make time control. The position was pretty tricky and about even, and White was moving quickly but still had to make several moves to reach time control.
All of a sudden Black makes a move really quickly, slams the piece on the board, and then smacks the clock so hard that it falls over and messes up a good portion of the pieces. We were all pretty startled by the commotion. White obviously stopped the clock and they proceeded to set up the position again, but Black intentionally misplaced some of the pieces to annoy White even more.

Long story short, the tactic worked and White blundered a whole piece a move or two later and Black went on to win.

After the game the Black player told me that he did that on purpose to exasperate his opponent.

Writing down extra moves can be penalized.

Knocking down pieces is no upside in doing either.
The white player above should just had pressed the clock and asked the black player to set up all pieces correctly at his own time.

Black had plenty of time tho, and kept setting the pieces on the wrong squares on purpose.

Still dont understand any upside in doing what he did...

First time, the black player has to set up all pieces correctly on his own time
second time warning and same as above
Third time he will probably lose the game

Sosonko wrote in his book that Gufeld in a lost position once triggered the fire alarm.

Does not sound like a clever idea either.
It costs like 500$ to call the fire department in my country and if they find out who triggered the false alarm, he would have to pay for it

Gufeld was known for being eccentric, to put it mildly. There is another story (perhaps also told by Sosonko) about when Gufeld had an adjourned game. He had a better position, but called his opponent's hotel to try to offer a draw. He couldn't get hold of his opponent, but when the time came to resume the session he approached him again and offered a draw. The opponent accepted and Gufeld instantly grabbed the envelope from the arbiter, ripped it open, and ate the scoresheet so that no one would ever find out what move he had sealed.

This thread is just a reminder of why live chess sucks, particularly when you don't have at least a ~30 second increment on each move. Playing live chess with no increment is simply stupid imo.

Sometimes it works in blitz games to exchange the starting position of your opponent's king and queen before he arrives, especially when they look similar.
After move 3 he is not allowed to change back, and he won't be able to castle, or maybe you win by touch-move at some point

I have tried the more valuable method. Put your rook to f2 and your bishop to a2. Then hope he won't notice it or stop the mate in the next 3 moves. No success so far.

Can you imagine turning in a 1-move game score that was nothing but 1. Bxf7# For some reason this is really funny to me right now.

Josh Watikin talked about some of this crap in his book "The Art of Learning" - some of it was very subtle -

in India, (I think) they used some archaic non-staunton pieces for the tournament - he played a bit like he was playing blindfolded and did ok

In another situation, of course, parents would talk to the kids in Russian and you could tell they were talking about the game -

My favorite story (and most interesting) was how Josh was losing now and again to a player by making a bad move in a bad spot....later a guy who knew how the Russians trained their players for dirty tricks pointed out that when it was a critical position, the player would tap a piece...and every so subtly speed up the tapping so as to subliminally affect Josh's thought process (rushing it, I suppose) - but once you know that, it should be easy to deal with -

guys like this remind me of those who act like dickwads at the poker table saying it helps them win - no, it just serves as self-justification for their dickheadness

Only think I ever had happen was playing with a guy on a cardtable who had a habit of bumping the cardtable in such a way as to disrupt my thought process

Works only if the opponent does not know the rules. I actually did that in a blitz tournament. And after I mated him HE demanded a win. After some thought from the judge we played the game again. That guy btw killed himself I think due to gambling debts.

http://www.goddesschess.com/genderandchess/cowley1.html

/thread

I agree with Cowley. It is like one of those attention tests or whatever they are called. Do you see the pieces? I hope somebody will make a video out of this.

on the level of lame excuses, that one is pretty good - I forgot who it was that said they never knew a chess player who LOST a game - he always had some excuse for losing OTHERWISE he could have won -

wanna talk distracting? - now ME in revealing clothes - that's distracting

I hardly even look at my opponents when playing - funny

RB

Did you punch him in the face when he told you that?

But seriously, if someone ever tried to pull that crap on me I'd immediately get the tournament director and explain how it's way too convenient for him to "knock down the clock and scatter the pieces" when I have 2 minutes left. Of course the aim would be for being granted more time.

I think this would also give more time to distract myself from the nonsense and readjust to the game, as I'm sure the TD would take his time checking out the situation.

QFMFT

5 second delay <<<< 5 second increment

and it's not even close. Increment is just better, and I know that a few major tournament directors agree with me too.

So how can we get USCF to change from 5 sec. delay to increment for tournaments?


I had read the Art of Learning,it's absolutely great btw, and I noted that tapping trick as well. It's fairly subtle so it's good to be on the look out for it.

I'll tell you what's a dirty trick - getting a free week's subscription on chess.com for diamond membership - that's a dirty trick - how can I possibly get thru all the Chess Mentor programs in 7 days

RB

Just don't sleep and use 2 monitors when going through it.