| > "death": losing player called to greater things, one hopes. What if the position is such that your opponent's death does not prevent them from completing the game? For example, it is your move, you are in check, the only way to get out of check is by capturing the checking piece, and the only way to capture the checking piece will stalemate your opponent. Your opponent then dies. In that position arguably the death of the opponent is irrelevant because there are no circumstances under which they need to take any further action. If you do not make any further moves your flag will fall and that ends the game. A dead opponent cannot call your flag, but the arbiter can. Whether flag fall is a loss or draw for you depends on whether or not your opponent could theoretically checkmate you. If you do make your move and hit your clock, that produces a stalemate on the board which immediately ends the game. In all cases in this scenario the game ends in either a draw or loss for you with no further action required on the part of your opponent. I think that in this case it would make sense to record termination as "normal" as the death of your opponent was almost certainly irrelevant to the outcome--it is just an interesting bit of trivia about the game. (I say "almost certainly" because there is one way your opponent could have affected the outcome if they had not died--they might have resigned before you made your move). |