SNCL Rounds 5 and 6 - What else can go wrong?

I am sitting at home thinking about today.  OMG  What a day!  It was Rounds 5 and 6 of the SNCL at Dunfermline.  It has been a disaster.  When people say us Senior Arbiters don't make mistakes, wow do I have a shock for you.

The day started pretty badly.  Loading the boards into the car I noticed we were one short.  Instead of the expected 8, I only had 7???  Now these boards are not the lightest, they are not the sort of thing you can sneak into your pocket and walk off with suddenly from Perth, somehow we only had 7 boards.  What's worse is I never noticed!!! (In my defence I did not pack the car to come back from Perth and I had 8 sets of gubbings for the electrics)

Come in 8188 I am missing you!

It had to be one of three places.  Either Dave had it and didn't notice, It was mixed up with the wooden boards or someone has very large pockets!

John McNicol had the wooden boards in his car, so a quick check ruled that out.  Knowing Dave was using his boards today, I sent him a message to check to see if 8188 (the serial number) had made its way down there.  Thankfully it had!!  Phew what a relief, the thought of standing tall before the man turned my knees to jelly!

Find that board or I'll set Clement on you!

So the day started well...  It quickly fell away!  For reasons I will never understand, I loaded the wrong fixture list last night.  At the start of the season, we had a couple of teams still to confirm, I made up 2 fixture lists, depending on whom we were going to replace the team with should they not play.  Divisions 1 and 4 were fine as they were not affected, but 2 and 3 had the completely wrong fixtures.

I have never been so grateful for team captains coming up to me to query if they had the right opponent.  Quick check of the site where I have the master list confirmed if I was not drinking last night, I should have been!

In a fit of insight, I accidentally printed off an extra blank set of forms.  They came in useful and we started only 10 minutes late!

Play starts.  Blessed relief, I can relax and get cracking on the mountain of paperwork needed for SNCL.  Session is going along quite nicely when I am called to a board.  Player is claiming a draw.  Nothing wrong with that I hear you say, said player has 17 minutes left on his clock.  There is a reason we should be issued with titanium bound versions of the rule book...

As if fate could not deal me another blow.  The final game to finish on the live boards ended in a time scramble.  Neither player noticed the half drunk cup of coffee near the clock but after a hurried hand sent it flying, I had 2 live boards and pieces to dry out.  AAARRRGGHHH!!!!

I need a lie down after that :D  Just one of those days...

The Scottish Chess Tour - Episode 3 - The Perth Congress

The Scottish Chess Tour rolled into Perth.  For once the weather was not too bad.  Little cool but no snow.

Once again, David has excelled himself and found a superb venue.  We are in the ballroom of the Salutation Hotel.  Feedback from the players has been excellent

We have three projectors at the back showing the open matches and woe betide the arbiter who gets between the players watching and the screen :D

As always the tournament has been full of hilarity.  Between watching them trying to put the screens down (took about 5 minutes with various ones going up and down), players not being able to follow instruction on how to fill in a scoresheet...

All weekend we have had long games.  And I mean really long games.  100+ moves is fast becoming the norm!  It is the only downside to incremental time controls.

In round 5 we had a situation that had us in stiches.  The following position was reached.

It is a classic book draw.  The result should be forthcoming.  The players on the other hand had a different idea and 1 hour later this was the position

Yep still a book draw.

Here is one of the Arbiting team a bit later on waiting for the result...

Finally the result was handed in.  Would it surprise you that they agreed a draw.  John McNicoll took a picture of the players at the crucial position

It has been a long weekend.....