Tournament rules and touch move rule

Hello,

soon I will play in an actual tournament for the first time . 

I have some questions

what if the other player touched a piece , I claimed a touch-move rule but he denied . and the arbiter was not around to witness ?

secondly , what are the rules for writing on the score sheet  ?  are those the legal moves of the match ? what happens if one player wrote some moves and played others?

The touch move rule is tricky.  Unless there is a witness, there isnt much you can do.

Its against the rules to write a move down before making it.  

by " nobody was around" you mean it can be a normal watcher ? or it has to be an arbiter ?

I'm too lazy to check the rule book on this one, but I assume if there's somebody who will vouch for you that he touched the piece, then you're fine. Even then, it's probably at the arbiter's discretion. 

yeah but then maybe it's a set up , and the person has been hired by the player himself to vouch for him . lol it's becoming a mess 

As a USCF Tournament Director (Arbiter) I've seen many touch-move claims and I can only remember ONE time I ruled it was a touch-move because the offender admitted picking a piece up and putting it back down on its original square.

Unless there are witnesses TD's are not supposed to rule a touch-move when the players dispute one occurred.   Note also that a touch-move has to be an intentional touching the piece.  If a player brushes a piece while reaching toward another piece or bumps a piece with his elbow - NO touch-move occurred.

USCF Scorekeeping: both players are required to keep score unless there are less than 5 minutes on the clock and less than 30 seconds in incremental time. Players must move first then record the move and the scoresheets must remain visible to both players at all times.  While it is technically against the rules, I've seen scholastic events where all coaches agreed that unrated players could put a check mark next to the move instead of writing the actual move because they didn't know the notation but the coaches wanted them to have the experience of playing in a tournament.

In any case, if one player is keeping score and the other isn't, any dispute will be judged by the scorebook of the person keeping score.

When there is a dispute where the scoresheets differ, the TD can take into account erasure marks, obviously ridiculous moves, and any other signs one player is cheating, but the usual result is that the game is moved back to the position where the scorebooks last agreed and some time may be put back on the clocks.  The main factor in how far back to go is whether the next round or end of tourney awards will begin on time.  But someone writing the wrong moves on purpose isn't likely to be able to keep it up for a lot of moves.

  It would be difficult for the arbiter to know if the witness is a friend/relative/whatever of one of the competitors.  Someone could claim their opponent touched a piece and have a couple of his buddies swear to it.

As a TD, I've seen veterans cheat on new players by reaching over and picking up one of their pieces, usually knight, that had been captured and removed from the board and start acting like they're playing with it, rotating it in their hand or gently tapping on the table and as soon as the new player looks away they put it on the board!

If this ever happens to you, tell them YOU captured the piece and tell them to put it down. If it happens again, stop the clocks and summon the Arbiter/TD.

This is where good scorekeeping is important!

Whenever I've seen players doing such a thing I kept an eye on them and several times caught them cheating.  They were given a loss for the game and expelled from the tournament.

  What if as soon as you notice you touched the wrong piece or you see it is a bad move at the last second, you "trip" or "faint" and fall on the board sending the pieces flying everywhere?

@ Mick & GodsPawn:

I saw this 'writing down your move before making it is against the rules' business in another thread recently, but never got around to asking for more of an explanation, and now i can't find it.

Is it a rule simply to keep errors on the scoresheets to a minimum, to prevent mistakes like when a player changes their mind after writing down their (now inaccurate) move and forgets to update their sheet afterward?  Or is there another reason?

In that same thread, it was mentioned that recording one's move before actually moving could also be a form of cheating -- can you explain this to me?

Ahhh, just found that other thread:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/recording-moves-1?newCommentCount=1&page=1#first_new_comment

I'll bug them about it over there, too.

Hi. This happened to me during an amateur league some time ago (when I was a child). There were 2 hours + no inc. for everybody. My opponent didn't come, so i played e4 and pressed the clock. After 1 hour, the guy appears. The game keeps on with no trouble, but during the last 10 min for him (not 5), he stops scorekeeping.

After all, he won me by checkmate (40 years old guy vs 11 years old amateur kid). There was no TD, but our coach was always with us since we were children. I complained about how the guy stopped scorekeeping before he was in the right of doing that, so we made it formal. Nothing happened in the end, but I want to know what SHOULD had happened in case that a TD noticed that during the live game (i.e. in a more serious tournament).

Ty

Yeah, never happened to me either, most chess players have a little honor at least....I would say don't even worry about it...worry about getting beat because with no OTB experience you may be lucky just to win a few games, but all depends on the pairings and who shows up, etc....

I've violated the touch-move rule plenty of times, and so have my opponents. We've never made a big deal about it, since it was obvious we were just adjusting the pieces during our turn, even if we didn't say the weird french word for doing so.

I've seen a touch move violation twice.

The first was when my opponent made a gross blunder which would have lost a piece.  I was clearly winning the game and waived the rule.  I thought that showing proper technique would provide a better lesson rather than lose with a silly blunder.

The second happened to a friend but not witnessed.  His opponent picked up a knight, realize that moving it would allow checkmate, and played another move.  The TD could not enforce the rules without another to vouch for either side.  Since this was a team tournament, this may have effected the man's character.

MickinMD provides the correct ruling, however there is one thing he forgot to mention.  If the player wrote down the move before touching the piece, this can be used as intent to make the move, then the rule can be enforced.  This could be used is one reads the notation of the opponentn and --thinking it to be a bad move-- make a false claim.