To resign, or not to resign

no

Well, you can, obviously, promote a bunch of pawns, but it seems like it would only be enjoyable if you were sadistic to some degree. I don't really find it interesting to embarrass my opponent because their pain isn't my pleasure. I just want to play well. That, by the way, can involve crushing the opponent, but crushing just for the sake of crushing I don't see the need.

I guess if you think playing on is immoral this is your payback, so it may partially depend on one's views on the etiquette of playing on.

A refusal to resign an utterly lost game is akin to stating an asinine opinion...you have earned your response.

I wouldn't agree that it must be asinine. For one thing it takes advantage of the fact that even if you still lose you didn't risk anything. If one lost more points for losing to checkmate than by resigning, there would be a lot more pressure to be "right," but given that there is zero penalty, a few extra moves to make things even clearer than they seem to be is a tempting option, plus being on the benefiting side of any "unpredictable" collapse by the opponent.

Honestly I find this factor quite important. Even if I still lose I never really feel regret for having not resigned sooner, because it's merely an opportunity to lose sooner. Meanwhile I get added clarity and don't have to speculate about what "would have happened" and can just let the game finish as it may. If some weird psychological thing happens that makes the opponent make an uncharacteristic blunder, well then that'll make for an interesting story. If not, again, it's not like I have missed an opportunity there.

http://www.chess.com/livechess/game?id=890508520

Check out this bullet game where I was completely dead to rights; but had one last respite, and so I sacked the final rook with +, which was all I had, but it stunned him for 1.5 seconds and he lost on time!  Bwahahahaha.  Never resign!

Elubus,you missed the qualifier.... "utterly lost"....in that situation,there is nothing to clarify in the position,except,perhaps,where the losing player would like place his chess tombstone.

In any case my distinction between playing on for a long time and making more queens is that the former in a strange way can just be a riskless game strategy whereas the latter isn't really a game strategy -- in other words, you're not doing it because you think it can make a win any more likely -- it may make it less likely because of the increased possibility of a stalemate -- yet pleasure is still derived from it, again of a sadistic kind it seems. 

It doesn't matter -- the risk of playing on doesn't increase -- it remains at zero. If you can find a way to be absolutely 100% sure about a win/loss, ok, but I don't see how it will work because uncharacteristic mistakes can and do happen. And I'm not even talking about just a super low 1 in 100000 chance or something -- the chance of saving the position could be higher than that. It's not like we have empirically tested how many times one would win an "utterly won position" out of a thousand in tournament conditions. So we have to trust our psychological impulse -- but our psychology has ways of deceiving us. We might see a really nice position for one side, grow attached to its awesomeness, and then be tempted to assume it's simply impossible to mess it up, but we might forget that the actual process of winning it can still tire us out, even bore us, which can have consequences.

I'll resign when comfortable, but if I make all those calculations in the above paragraph I'm pretty much doing my opponent's work for him, when instead I can just make a move and simply see what happens :)

Who wants a limp washrag rolling over and dying when you can deliver a #; way more satisfying than a resignation, methinks.

Another point is that it's easy to escalate what one considers to be utterly lost. Sure it might start out with being down two queens, but it can quickly evolve, to the point where anytime a player gets the psychological reaction "ugh this position is awful" (precsiely the same reaction as being down two queens ) they'll just stop thinking and concede. Well, that could quite plausibly happen in a merely bad position, or a lost position that still may take some technique to finish off. Someone who gets discouraged when a position looks "ugly" could easily be missing a real chance to save the game.

So yeah, I'd rather be the one who would even be curious if a person up two queens might somehow mess it up; at least then it'll be hard for me to give up just because of an ugly looking position (a psychological mistake). Always good to stay on the side of scepticism. If you have to overcompensate (play on "ridiculous" positions) to ensure that, by all means.

Frodo has the ring of power...

I did that in a friendly game and it turned out to be a stalemate! :) lol

It depends on the situation; I lost in a game against 6 or 7 knights once. :) Typically if I am playing for fun and I know the other person I will do things like that. If it were a "serious" (are any chess.com games really serious? Another discussion :) ) game I would try to finish it asap; if it means queening 1 or 2 extra pawns sure, if not then will use what I have.

You were both right.

Chess is played generally by people with loony idiosyncrasies.