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The "Hidden" Side of Chess:
Correspondence Play

By Steve Ryan

Part 1 of 2

If, as a complete chess addict, you bemoan the relatively low profile chess has as a sport/science/hobby, it may cheer you to learn that the OTB (over-the-board) crowd of chess players has, relatively speaking, a much higher profile than Correspondence players. OTB has a certain "cachet" or "mystique", if you will, whereas Correspondence Chess, by its very nature, exits in obscurity.

CC usually takes place as a solitary activity on top of someone's dining room table or (increasingly) in front of a computer terminal. No amazing sacrifices to dazzle the onlooking crowd of patzers (though amazing sacrifices do take place if you examine some games), just a patient unhurried search for the best move. You need a special type of mentality to play CC, best described as a cross between a hired assassin and Mahatma Gandhi; a person willing to plunge the knife slowly but deeply while smiling and apologizing for doing so.

CC has thousands of players worldwide and a large variety of clubs from which to choose. While CC players generally follow the same rules of chess as the OTB crowd, correspondence play does have a few different rules to deal with time keeping, "touch-move", defaults, poor sportsmanship, and related issues. CC itself has the traditional postal play method with e-mail clubs and tournaments growing rapidly. Some debate exists about whether postal play will become extinct given the ease of e-mail. Personally, I think it will, but not for many years to come.

Postal Games

Any chess game consists of an exchange of moves between opponents. A Grandmaster giving an over-the-board "simul” will have more than one opponent at a time; a situation frequently encountered in a correspondence match. While the OTB player has his/her opponent in front of him, the CC player may have an opponent literally on the other side of the world. OTB players physically move their pieces and operate a time clock. CC'ers receive moves by regular post and/or e-mail and also do time keeping.

In a regular postal tournament, the card or letter containing your opponent's move may have taken two or more weeks to arrive, depending on its point of origin and the reliability of the postal service in that country. Sometimes a move never arrives and then things can get quite interesting.

Postal tournaments may take place as some part of a championship "cycle" arranged by an organization such as the ICCF (International Correspondence Chess Federation), or as a "friendly" tournament between the CC federations of two nations (no prizes or titles - just a chess game and the opportunity to collect some stamps) or even just as a game or two between some people with no (inter)national federations or anything official involved.

Assuming you have an opponent arranged by some method, one or the other of you will play White in Game A and send the first move. If you don't get White in Game A you will in Game B. For "overseas" matches the rules usually require you to use airmail as opposed to surface mail. Otherwise, the match could last decades as opposed to merely a year or two. Your opponent, upon receiving your move, will carefully note the date of arrival and the move itself. After due consideration he will send a reply noting the date of dispatch, the elapsed time for his move and the total elapsed time for both of you. This process gets repeated for the length of the game. You must rely on the honesty of your opponent to note the correct arrival date, as you have no method of knowing for sure unless you go to the time and expense to "register" each card you send. Smart postal players will "think on their opponent's time"; i.e. they will have a move ready, if possible, for any reply their opponent might send while the cards go through the mail.

After you have exchanged about 7 moves or more you can develop a sense of the average time it takes to make a one-way trip for a move, especially in domestic tournaments. You may also develop this "time sense" in an overseas match relying on airmail and sometimes develop it surprisingly fast if your opponent's country has reliable mail service.

A common rule in postal tournaments stipulates that the indicated "dispatch date" on your card or letter must agree with the cancellation date as stamped by the post office. If you receive a card on Monday September 1st (for example) in the morning mail and slip your reply in the afternoon mail of the same day your opponent may still claim you have used 1 day of RT (Reflection Time) instead of 0 if the cancellation date says September 2nd. So don't mail a card just before midnight. Give it lots of time and take into account that it may sit for a day or more before it gets canceled.

Sometimes an opponent will "go silent" and will stop answering your moves. A "silent" opponent means the TD of the club(s) must get involved after you have submitted a time complaint. Conduct of this kind, if not done for a legitimate reason, usually results in a penalty of some sort ranging from addition of extra days to your RT total to forfeiture of the game.

In my experience, the vast majority of postal players abide by the rules and mark arrival/dispatch times correctly. Most clubs encourage the players to send more than just moves. A few friendly remarks and a bit of background on yourself can lead to a lasting friendship, albeit you may never meet the person face-to-face.

Many postal players do indeed collect stamps and prefer the more "relaxed" pace of postal games as opposed to e-mail. Some have several games on the go at once and receive one or more cards per day, sort of a "slow simul" so to speak. But you do need patience and good abilities in record keeping. And a lot of stamps.

E-Mail Games

If you consider postal chess too slow for your taste you may wish to take a look at "lightning" CC, correspondence chess by e-mail. E-mail Correspondence Chess (EMCC) operates much the same as postal CC but has its own unique rules and problems.

In EMCC Internet Service Providers and telephone lines take the place of stamps and postal systems. Traditional postal players may scoff at a collection of e-mail addresses compared to exotic stamps from the world over, but it does have the advantage of being much faster and you will save a lot of money on postage if you play long enough.

I personally have not had an individual e-mail game go beyond 3 months. An entire tournament with several rounds may get completed within a year. Of course, you may find that you can't simultaneously carry as many e-mail games as postal, but you will probably complete more e-mail games per year, if that
concerns you.

At the start, your TD will provide you with a game assignment, your opponent's e-mail address, and other pertinent information. Most clubs require you to confirm the start of the game by copying your first move to the TD. After that, you do not contact the TD again until you (if the winner) report the result of the game, or some kind of problem develops. As in postal chess, your opponent may "go silent" and stop answering. Your messages to him may start to bounce back, which usually means he has changed his e-mail address and forgotten to tell you or had his service discontinued. Both outgoing and incoming messages will at least have a time/date stamp which eliminates the uncertainty about when a mailed postcard actually receives a cancellation stamp (assuming it gets a legible one in the first place). Your opponent, upon receiving your move, will note the time stamp and the move. He may reply literally within
minutes. In the opening phase of a game you may exchange several moves in one day. The same thing will happen in the event of "obvious" captures and recaptures, forced moves and "hypothetical sequences" (see further on).

Rules & Arbitration

As you might expect, the different CC organizations have different "in-house" rules for required notation, time keeping, player conduct, transmission of moves and similar topics, though all play by the universal rules of chess as already established. Nevertheless, the clubs have enough common ground for their in-
house rules to allow the following generalizations:

1. You send moves sequentially by e-mail or regular post after the start of the game by the appropriate club officials.

2. You note the arrival date of your opponent's move and the dispatch date of your reply. The difference between the two dates equals your reflection time (RT) for that move. You must keep track of the total RT used by yourself and your opponent (the sum of the time for individual moves).

3. You must complete a given number of moves in a certain time period. This requirement mirrors that of OTB play though at a much slower pace. Most clubs make provision for vacation time and special leave. Depending on the rules of the club concerned you may or may not accumulate unused RT, which you can
"bank" for future use.

4. Any legal move must stand AS SENT (OTB equivalent - the "touch-move" rule).

5. An illegal/impossible or ambiguous move gets referred back to the sender for clarification. RT for the sender of such a move continues to run. This provision does NOT mean that you can delay asking for clarification in order to run your opponent out of time. A move sent in the wrong notation becomes an illegal move.

6. You must advise all your opponents and club officials of any change of your postal or e-mail address.

7. The winner of a game (or White in case of a draw) must send the result of the game to the TD. If, in a match involving promotion to the next round, the players draw both games, the player with the lower rating advances.

8. Any games outstanding at the end of a time period for a particular tournament usually go to high-rated players for arbitration.

9. While CC clubs encourage friendly communication between opponents they will react swiftly to any personal attacks, racist/sexual slurs and similar things. Penalties range from additional RT assigned to the offender's total to expulsion from the club.

10. Players may consult opening compendia, end game studies, printed or computer-based game databases, chess instruction books and general chess literature of any kind. Unfortunately, I believe, some organizations, while not encouraging the use of chess engines for analysis of a game in progress, have no rules against this practice. The same goes for consulting other players.

11. To speed up play in the opening and in the event of "obvious" captures and recaptures, CC clubs allow "hypothetical sequences/moves", also called "if-then moves". It would go something like 1.e4 if e5 2.Nf3. You have made the first move 1.e4. IF your opponent chooses to answer 1...e5, then he already has your second move 2.Nf3. Players may agree to quite lengthy hypothetical sequences. "Thematic" tournaments really consist of nothing more than a hypothetical series of moves to which both players have agreed and which follow some standard opening. Players may accept all, none or part of a hypothetical sequence. If you accept only a part, you must accept the moves in numerical order; no "cherry picking".

Naturally, any given set of rules cannot cover all possible circumstances. To cover this contingency CC clubs will have arbiters on staff. An arbiter need not necessarily have a high rating as he/she does not adjudicate the result of an unfinished game, but he must have excellent knowledge of club rules and the rules of chess in general. To lessen the workload of the arbiters, clubs can encourage members to settle disputes between themselves, if possible, before asking for arbitration.

Some bizarre situations have arisen. Take the case of one player who insisted on sending Spice Girls' sound tracks to his opponent with each move. Such behavior would fall under rule 9 above. Especially the Spice Girls! The most common complaint in CC involves an opponent who has "gone silent" (stopped answering moves). You may never find out why and yes, someone has already tried "alien abduction", but the TD didn't go for it. A "silent" opponent will most likely incur a time default. If he has forgotten to advise you of an address change he may start to wonder why YOU haven't answered HIS last move. If you want a real headache to sort out, try settling a dispute involving an illegal/impossible move that went unnoticed. The game continues merrily along until one player makes some other kind of infraction. Then it hits the fan boys and girls, it really does.

I don't know if I have had an unusually good streak of luck, but I can remember only one instance in 30 years of CC play that involved making a complaint to the arbiter (a silent opponent). Let's face it, in CC, if an opponent wants to smoke, crack his knuckles, belch, get up and walk around or sit there stark naked, it won't bother you a bit.