Chris Rice wrote:Chris Rice wrote: The worst example I saw was Anand, four pawns up against Kramnik in an easily winning position, just making moves and losing pawn after pawn. Finally, he is about to queen his e-pawn and realises that Kramnik has a knight fork so Anand in a blind panic promotes to a knight and I'm pretty sure illegally uses two hands to do it. The video on the Chess24 (scroll down to the bottom) shows those last few moves if anyone wants to
view it. It looked to me that the two players thought the whole thing was a farce, agreed to a draw and laughed it off.
10 days later and suddenly its
breaking news....
In this Peter Doggers article I'm wondering how David Sedgwick would view the sentence "Few arbiters in the world would have had the guts to tell a five-time world champion that he lost this game due to an illegal move." From what I saw both Kramnik and Anand were perfectly happy to draw but should there have been someone watching and intervening?
The FIDE Laws of Chess state that if there is one arbiter per game and the games are recorded then standard competition rules apply. Otherwise blitz rules apply. If there had been one arbiter per game then, yes, there should have been someone watching and intervening, but then it would have been under standard competition rules and a first illegal move would not have ended the game. With many games per arbiter it is a physical impossibility for an arbiter to watch every game.
So, bottom line, the question as posed doesn't get off the ground. It was up to Kramnik to claim the win.
It's also worth noting that had there been an arbiter watching he would have had to act swiftly enough to intervene before the handshake. The draw agreement ends the game. A moment or two's hesitation and it is too late.
Ah, but I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.