An inspiringly optimistic spiritual outlook from the PGN standard, so thank you for that.
Technically, over the board one could just wait until their deceased opponent flags to claim a win, but in practice, for every occasion I'm aware of in high level tournament play, the remaining player will adjudicate the game honestly according to their evaluation of the position -- even if that means resigning out of respect for his or her opponent. See Karapanos-Zoler (2009), or Meier-Niyizibi from the 2014 Olympiad [1].
One more thing to note is that playing high level chess is in fact a strenuous activity; one grandmaster playing while wearing a heart monitor recorded burning 560 calories in two hours. [2] Top players like Carlsen or Caruana keep themselves in peak physical condition in addition to their chess preparation.
And although chess players as a demographic may have certain increased predispositions to conditions like Asperger's, schizophrenia, or cardiovascular diseases (likely due to the sedentary nature of the game), I'll relay something one older player once commented to me: that he has never found a documented case of a high level tournament chess player succumbing to Alzheimer's disease.
[0] https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1554879
[1] https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1771703
[2] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...
checkmate (n.) mid-14c., in chess, said of a king when it is in check and cannot escape it, from Old French eschec mat (Modern French échec et mat), which (with Spanish jaque y mate, Italian scacco-matto) is from Arabic shah mat "the king died" (see check (n.1)), which according to Barnhart is a misinterpretation of Persian mat "be astonished" as mata "to die," mat "he is dead." Hence Persian shah mat, if it is the ultimate source of the word, would be literally "the king is left helpless, the king is stumped."
Growing up, I thought that's where the expression came from, and had no clue it was from Arabic! Thanks for this.
I play(ed) international correspondence chess. The games can go on for years. In one of my games, my opponent sadly passed away. The game was adjuticated to a draw nine months after we had started.
I did not have much personal connection with my opponent or interaction beyond our moves and an initial greeting, but it was obviously an extremely sad way for the game to end.
Edit: the termination string in my game was actually that of a draw by adjudication, but I do want to make it clear that a death during a chess game is not as uncommon as one might expect.
This was traditionally played by players exchanging moves via letters sent by post.
Naturally people use the internet more these days, but with a lot of time allowed between moves to keep the slow pace of correspondence chess.
Allowing this amount of time between moves completely changes the character of the game. There’s ample time of deep analysis and research. There’s more incentive to leave the beaten track if you need to push for a win.
It’s an extremely different game to over-the-board chess.
"death": losing player called to greater things, one hopes.
What if the position is such that your opponent's death does not prevent them from completing the game?
For example, it is your move, you are in check, the only way to get out of check is by capturing the checking piece, and the only way to capture the checking piece will stalemate your opponent. Your opponent then dies.
In that position arguably the death of the opponent is irrelevant because there are no circumstances under which they need to take any further action.
If you do not make any further moves your flag will fall and that ends the game. A dead opponent cannot call your flag, but the arbiter can. Whether flag fall is a loss or draw for you depends on whether or not your opponent could theoretically checkmate you.
If you do make your move and hit your clock, that produces a stalemate on the board which immediately ends the game.
In all cases in this scenario the game ends in either a draw or loss for you with no further action required on the part of your opponent.
I think that in this case it would make sense to record termination as "normal" as the death of your opponent was almost certainly irrelevant to the outcome--it is just an interesting bit of trivia about the game. (I say "almost certainly" because there is one way your opponent could have affected the outcome if they had not died--they might have resigned before you made your move).
Murdering your opponent will almost definitely be considered a rule infraction.
Although there might be some edge cases if the murderer was an absolute ruler of the current country. Or maybe if you happened to kill your opponent in self defense somehow.
You mean like King Canute of Denmark, England, and Norway? [0]
[0] https://wegochess.com/complete-timeline-of-every-chess-relat...
You sacricifive your next dozen or so free years for the victory.
A high ego grandmaster on the decline may decide loss of the remainder of their freedom in life is worth the sacrifice.
The player did not lose, they were recruited to St. Peter's Celestial Chess team.
“6.9. Except where one of Articles 5.1.1, 5.1.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.2, 5.2.3 applies, if a player does not complete the prescribed number of moves in the allotted time, the game is lost by that player. However, the game is drawn if the position is such that the opponent cannot checkmate the player’s king by any possible series of legal moves.”
Therefore, a draw due to player death is also possible.
Pawns can get promoted, so there are are many king vs king + pawn positions that are a win for the player having the pawn.
I mea I could setup my next moves and kind of play the game from the grave especially in some positions of strength it doesn't even matter what the opponent plays ?