Oops! I Resigned Again!

By Sam Shankland and Ian Rogers

Uh-oh! That doesn’t look right!?

Who would be silly enough to resign a tournament game they were not losing? As Oops! I Resigned Again! shows, almost anyone – including some of the world’s best players!

Learn the stories behind the most embarrassing moment any chessplayer can suffer, while trying to outmatch the poor, unfortunate player who resigned. Indeed, this is the only chess puzzle book where you cannot do worse than the player in the game! Pit your wits against legends such as Kramnik, Nunn, Tarrasch and Timman, knowing that they failed the test and that you can, perhaps, do better.

Australian Grandmaster Ian Rogers has assembled 100 extraordinary positions in themed sets of five puzzles designed to both baffle and delight the solver, in a format which makes it easy to sneak a look at the answer!

With a foreword written by US Olympian Sam Shankland – baring his soul about his own silly resignation at a top level tournament – Oops! I Resigned Again! is a rare treat for chessplayers of all strengths, who after finishing the book will fervently hope never to have to say... Oops!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Russell Enterprises, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949859430

Book preview

Introduction

The most embarrassing moment in my chess career.

I felt like an idiot.

It is still a painful memory.

Resigning a game where you stand well or are actually winning is every player’s nightmare, as the above quotes from strong players show. So why would anyone want to read (or write) a puzzle book covering such unfortunate events?

First, this is the perfect puzzle book for building up a player’s self-confidence. No matter what solution the reader discovers, it cannot possibly be worse than the choice made by the player in the game.

Second, schadenfreude! Resigning unnecessarily is the chess equivalent of slipping on a banana peel – one person’s misfortune, but inherently humorous to observers. Deriving joy from another chessplayer’s heartbreak and embarrassment may not be an honourable character trait, but they brought it on themselves, didn’t they?

When I first started collecting examples for Oops! I Resigned Again!, it soon became clear that a trail had already been blazed by a trio of silly resignation pioneers: Ian Mullen and Moe Moss in their book Blunders and Brilliancies, Tim Krabbé, creator of the Chess Curiosities book and web site, and Klaus Trautmann, arbiter and author of Der letzte Fehler.

However as my collection of dumb resignations in classical games rose above 300 and I researched the stories behind the examples, I began to realise that plenty of the claimed silly resignations were not that at all.

Often a player had not resigned in the position claimed but had played on, or the claimed resource would not have saved the game. Less often, the position shown was never reached in the game, or a player had not resigned but had lost on time.

As an example, the following position arose in an East German Women’s Team Championship

Inge Rollwitz – Helma Beutner

Viereck East German Team Ch. 1965

Inge Rollwitz – a renowned Berlin player still active in 2020 at age 85 – played the powerful move 1.Qc6! and her younger opponent Helma Beutner resigned.

Later it was claimed that this was an unnecessary resignation because after the stunning resource 1...Qg1+!!, Black can save the day. However 1...Qg1+, while a wonderful idea, can be met by 2.Kxg1 d1(Q)+ 3.Rf1 Qd4+ 4.Kh1 when White stays a pawn up with a safer king – in other words White was winning anyway.

More than 40 possible Oops! puzzles similar to the above had to be discarded.

Then came hallucinations; most often players resigning because they thought they were going to be checkmated when there were no serious threats at all. (Having done this myself, I can empathise.)

An extreme example came in the following game.

Tom Rydstrom – Pia Cramling

Stockholm Rilton Cup 2014

Grandmaster Pia Cramling, one of the top seeds competing in Sweden’s premier open tournament, had been cruising to victory in the first round but after she played 68...Qxc4 69.Rg7+ Kh6, she suddenly realised that 70.Bd2+ would force mate and resigned before her opponent moved.

Of course there is no checkmate after 70.Bd2+ Kh5, and Black would have won in a few more moves had she played on. Such examples, while amusing, are regrettably not puzzle material.

Fortunately, there were still plenty of examples of human frailty from which to choose, and you will find moments of idiocy from many top Grandmasters in this book, some costing a Grandmaster first place in a high level tournament.

However while Oops! I Resigned Again! is intended to be fun to read and solve, the puzzles are not easy. Some require sophisticated endgame knowledge, some involve finding an unexpected stalemate, some just require finding an idea which would not normally be on a player’s top ten candidate moves.

The best way to approach these puzzles is to treat each example as a magic act; the player who resigned was fooled by his or her magician opponent. If a magician tells you that a move is !! or ??, don’t believe your eyes!

If, after doing your best to solve a puzzle, you find yourself saying I would have resigned that one too! at least you are in the company of legendary Grandmasters such as, Tarrasch, Nunn and Kramnik.

However if you succeed in solving a set of five correctly, you can consider yourself a chess magician. And if you solve the final four puzzles, you are a genius!

Ian Rogers

Sydney

July 2021

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the many players who offered their own examples of unnecessary resignations, telling the story of their game, and sometimes making themselves look stupid in the process.

Four people helped enormously with research – René Olthof, Aleksei Popovsky, John Donaldson and Gerard Welling – and I am very grateful to these fine conservators of chess history.

Thanks are also due to Britney Spears for inspiring the book title and chapter headings.

Great thanks to Cathy Rogers for her work as proof-reader, puzzle guinea pig, and for her steadfast support.

Foreword

Anyone who has ever played chess with some degree of seriousness knows how hard it is to play a brilliant game. Indeed, when considering the great games from throughout chess history, very few featured players who were not among the absolute best of their eras. Still, I would contend that what makes top players who they are is not so much that they have flashes of genius that leave the world in awe, but rather that they bring consistently high levels of play. When thinking about my own best games, I often think of clean, crisp wins where I got an advantage right from the opening, played very accurately to maintain it into the middlegame and endgame, and collected the full point without much back and forth.

Whether we are speaking about individual brilliant games or simply playing very strong chess consistently, the same principle holds true. Very, very few chess players are capable of playing a great game. Unfortunately, the inverse does not offer the same luxury; every chess player is capable of playing terribly. Sure, moments of unthinkable stupidity are more common among novice level players than among elite Grandmasters, but the best players in the world are human beings. Humans are an imperfect species that make mistakes, and even the best of us can fall on our faces.

My own experience with a premature resignation was exceptionally painful. After being stuck in the mid-high 2600s for a while, I was having the year of my life. I won the US Championship ahead of three top 10 players, crushed the Capablanca Memorial and American Continental back-to-back, reached a 61-game undefeated streak, made it up to 2731 FIDE and #21 in the world. I was playing my first true super-tournament, with three World Champions in the mix. I had been having a mediocre tournament this far and was sitting on 4½/10 when I faced Dutch number one Anish Giri in round 11. Anish was in very good form and was neck and neck with World Champion Magnus Carlsen in the fight for first place. After a tense fight, with the whole world watching, I resigned a technically drawn position.

This was surely the most humiliating moment of my life. The vitriol sent in my direction that night was worse than any I had ever experienced – I even had reputable people accusing me of being paid off to throw the game. As a professional athlete, I am used to some hate from the peanut gallery when I under-perform, and this is just part of the game. But I can’t remember any other time in my entire career when such messages bothered me in the slightest, and that day, they sure did. I was the laughingstock of the chess world, I knew it, and everyone around me knew