Why resign in chess

So may think why do they do so? After losing the queen, chess players lag behind their opponent in case of materials so much so that they even prefer to resign from the game. The etiquettes for resigning remain the same as discussed previously. Queen is considered the most powerful chess piece. So a loss of queen can cause a major weakness that may be even unrecoverable. So some chess players just accept their defeat as soon as they encounter this situation.

But keep in mind it is not always that you should not resign after losing the queen. The key takeaway is to determine the situation of the board, decide whether you can beat your opponent or not and then think of resigning. So just be careful. Experienced players are more good at deciding when they should resign. Hope you understood everything. Why didn't I play on, he wanted to know, I was only an exchange down. The problem, I explained to him, was that before I lost the exchange I had a desperate position and after I lost the exchange I still had a desperate position only now I was an exchange down and within a few moves more material was going to follow and I would still be in a desperate position.

He seemed disappointed, the sadist! On the other hand I have several times against stronger opposition had the experience during the postmortem after a loss finding out that my opponent and I both had the impression that we were winning until quite late in the game, mistakenly on my part, obviously.

They may very well have felt that I could have resigned sooner. Unfortunately my ability to evaluate the position accurately wasn't good enough to know that I was losing and should have resigned! If it had been I wouldn't have got into that position in the first place. If playing on the team of opponents in a timed simultaneous exhibit, resigning makes it easier on the exhibitor and thus harder on your teammates. Thus one is often advised to never resign in this setting: even if your position is hopeless, you may still help your teammates by forcing the exhibitor to actually win it.

Then again, some may regard this advice as unsportsmanlike. All the above answers refer to individual tournaments, but in a team what has happened or is happening on other boards might affect your decision. Admittedly it's more likely to affect what happens when a draw is offered, but you could play on if a draw, however unlikely, rather than a loss was of major benefit to the team as a whole. It all depends on whether you can confidently expect your opponent to pursue the win to completion competently.

Of course, the higher rated the players are, the more likely this is. At the club level, blunders happen frequently. But even at the highest levels of play, it can happen that the opponent missteps. Here's an example of a stunning upset from the Women's Olympiad, Baku that just finished.

White's ELO: Black's: That's a ELO difference For an example of how this question of "when to resign" plays out no pun intended at the GM level, see my response to the question "Is it possible to force checkmate with King, knight, and Bishop vs.

It is, of course, but apparently some GM's still want their opponents to prove it For me, it really depends on the situation, and my opponent. If my opponent is skilled or at least, better than me It saves us both a lot of fatigue and time, and I can use the extra time to go outside the tournament site and go get something to eat.

If my opponent is more around my own level, and my own situation isn't utterly hopeless, I'll wait longer to resign, because you never know when the opponent is going to blunder. The winner of any chess game is whoever makes the next to the last mistake I've played out and won a number of games in this type of situation, where I'm down a couple pieces plus maybe a few pawns in the middle game, and my opponent just "out of the blue" hangs their queen or something.

If I see that my opponent is in the process of executing a particularly pretty checkmate, I'll play it out. They worked for it, they deserve to see it played out on the board, and they deserve to take home a scoresheet with the complete checkmate sequence on it. One situation I never resign in, though, is when my opponent has a massive material advantage, such as multiple pieces against either a bare king, or against a bare king and maybe a few pawns.

At this point, I'll start trying to drive towards stalemate. My assumption is if my opponent has that much of a material advantage and I'm still not checkmated, they may not actually have a plan, and they may not be paying a lot of attention to stalemate possibilities.

I have managed to "steal" half a point out of games like this on a number of occasions. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Instead, they end when one player decides to resign and they knock their king over and offer their hand to their opponent.

But why do they do this? Is it really how the game should be played? Why do chess players resign? In the majority of cases, chess players resign because one player believes that they are no longer able to win the game.

However, many chess players, particularly beginners may resign far too early and while the option to resign is always open to you whether you are winning or losing you might want to think twice before you do so. There are three key strategic considerations in a chess game.

Do you know about sandbagging? It means hiding your strength deliberately. So when a player loses the game on purpose to enter lower-rated games in a tournament just to get the prize money it is known as sandbagging. A player who practices this thing is known as a sandbagger. What happens is in chess, each player is given some rating by the international chess governing body, FIDE.

These ratings represent the strength of each player. Now in tournaments players having similar strengths play against each other. This is a normal thing that is followed in all other kinds of games. But if a player with higher capability purposely plays against a player with less capability just for monetary gain then this is quite unethical.

This is not just seen in offline but also in online chess. The sandbaggers generally lose their queen or make any move just to show that they are going to lose their game naturally and then resign. And as they resign their rating decreases due to which now they become eligible to play in lower-rated sections of a tournament.

Sandbagging is seen in tournaments in which huge prize money is involved. This way of playing chess is against the standard rules. Several steps have been taken to eradicate this issue. With Etiquette! Chess players resign to accept their defeat and to respect their opponent instead of playing unnecessarily. Moreover, if they are playing in a tournament then they resign to prepare for the next game while some resign for sandbagging.

Hope you liked enjoyed reading this article and I hope I was able to answer all your questions. They identify that they are going to lose the game so they accept their defeat by resigning.