What about people who promote all their pawns instead of mating and proceed to stale mate in bullet (deliberately, of course!)? Asking for a friend.
We need a fourth, derpy-er dragon.
And the fifth kind that does that not deliberately, goes on /r/chess to ask how it’s not checkmate, then complain about what a dumbass rule stalemate is, and in doing so provide /r/anarchychess with a week’s worth of content.
I’m not exactly clear on when to resign if I blunder away my queen. If it is part of my opening, I will resign, and if I’m in the end game, I won’t. But at what point does etiquette say you should? Do opponents want to play out an uneven match? I like to play out games for practice, even if I’m hopeless, but I don’t want my opponents to feel like they are wasting their time.
I’ve always heard that until you’re master/GM level, it’s better just to play it out. Your opponent might blunder too, or accidentally stalemate you. At the very least, it’s good practice playing at a disadvantage. I know I’ve blundered huge leads myself, so who knows what’s going to happen?
There’s a psychological thing where we always assume that our opponents in games will never mess up, which makes it feel easy to give up the moment you make a mistake.
Also in the faster time formats it is a valid strategy to move faster than your opponent forcing them to run out of time. Even though you might be a queen or two down. But if they can’t mate you in the time allotted, well…
You don’t have to resign at any point. Losing your queen isn’t a reason to resign on its own. I resign when I can’t see a way to avoid losing and I believe my opponent is very unlikely to blunder their win away.
If you want to play out the game then you should. I feel like you agree to play for the time on the clock, so if your opponent feels like they’re wasting their time, then that’s their own problem and not your fault.
Sorry for unrelated comment… What’s a nice way to get into chess these days? Ideally on android. I tried Lichess at one point but none of the learning options really got me anywhere, I need something that holds my hand and assumes I know nothing (I don’t).
I’ve gotten into chess for the past year, and while I used Lichess for a little bit, I wound up going with chess.com primarily instead. The app is great. The learning modules are really helpful, and I love the puzzles.
It also has tens of millions of users on the platform, so your matchmaking is going to be more accurate, whether you need to be matched with opponents who just learned how the pieces move, all the way up to the top professional players.
As for outside resources, I’ve been mostly learning from random masters/GMs that have youtube channels.
Thank you! I’ll give it another go.
