Stuff in chess that is pointless.

 Stuff that in chess that is pointless.

1. Adjudications. 

Fortunately we have done away with adjudications and adjournment, the chess world's version of water torture. It is bad enough that classical games go on for hours, four five hours or however long they last, when a football match that generates millions of pounds in income only goes on for 90 minutes in total. Far worse that they once broke a chess game up into two or more parts and you'd have to come back and play on another day or evening to complete the game. Good riddance I'd say.

2. Post-mortems. 

Post-mortems are another thing of the past, relevant in the days before we could go back to our hotel rooms and check our phones and get a much better idea of what was going on in the game than our relatively weak by comparison, flesh and blood opponent could tell us.

3. Writing your moves down. 

Pretty much every chess game is online now, so why write our moves down at all? We don't for rapid play and blitz. Removing the need to write down our moves would also remove those embarrassing moments where you end up ripping up your scoresheet or throwing it at the opponent. 

4. Too many arbiters. 

At some tournaments now you have about twenty arbiters cramming up the room, there are almost more arbiters than players. Paying for accommodation and food for these free-rollers is an expense that could be better used on other things, like bumping up the prize money or paying for better conditions for titled chess players. Most tournaments need 1-2 arbiters max.

5. Long and boring speeches before the rounds.

We all know the rules now, but that doesn't seem to stop organisers and arbiters droning on for far too long before every round. Cut the boring chatter and just let us play.

6. The London system.

7. Scanners.

I don't mean the sci-fi masterpiece by David Cronenberg,  but those electronic wands that arbiters use to scan players. Perhaps they act as a deterrent, but you get the impression that everyone should be checked or no one at all. My advice would be to have every player scanned before the round. If you scan some players randomly as seems to be the custom, surely the real cheats are likely to slip through the net.

                                                When the chess prep didn't go to plan... 

8. Saying good luck to your opponent before the game.

Let's face it you don't mean it, so why say it at all?

9. Standing behind your opponent to look at the board from their perspective. 

This advice seems to be increasingly taken up, and is not only annoying as your opponent lurks behind you during the game but I also suspect that this advice is just useless. If you are standing away from the board the chances are you are not thinking about variations and the time could be better spent trying to calculate, so sit down instead. The only point of this tactic seems to be to piss off the opponent.

10. Chess coaching.

A controversial one to include as I offer chess coaching myself. However the ironic thing about chess is that in order to become good at chess you have to be obsessed with the game and spend every waking hour thinking about it. In which case you will get good anyway and probably don't need a chess coach in the first place. Most of the chess grandmasters that I have known, never had any formal coaching. 

11. Adult improvers.

I'm always beating up on adult improvers, so why change? Adult improvers is a pointless concept as we all know that adult chess players don't ever improve, they only go backwards as the real improvers, the juniors, pass them on the way to greatness. A sad reality but probably true.