[jibal]

As stated it's wrong--there aren't special rules for "serious play" as opposed to non-serious play. However, it's illegal under FIDE rules, but allowed under USCF rules (which cover many "serious" tournaments).

And I'm amused by another response that says that it's more common than I think and then cited a case where it "almost" happened, and says "many active tournament players will see it every year or two", as if that's not "extremely rare".

[umanwizard]

> there aren't special rules for "serious play" as opposed to non-serious play

Of course there are. We don’t follow every rule in the FIDE handbook when I play at Christmas with my brother in law.

For example, I would bet that in 99% of home games, touch-move is not enforced.

> allowed under USCF rules

interesting, I didn’t know that.

[jibal]

The discussion was about tournament rules, not what you do at Christmas, where the FIDE rules have no jurisdiction. And even if they did, what are these "special rules"? I don't think that you made a serious attempt to engage with what I wrote but instead were intent on naysaying, so I won't comment further.

[opello]

> As stated it's wrong

Restatement of the premise is not an explanation. I asked "why."

> However, it's illegal under FIDE rules

Under which rule[1]? I anticipate the argument being one of identity, such as "a rook is a rook whether it is right side up or upside down." This is an argument of convention. I don't see a CAD model that describes a rook's physical representation. If both players were to agree that for the sake of a promotion that an overturned rook would in fact be played like a queen the piece identity requirement would be satisfied and no descriptive rule would be violated. Or perhaps a coin, or a stone, or anything of suitable size and ergonomics.

[1] https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf

[umanwizard]

FIDE arbiter guidelines, page 17:

> When a player places an inverted (upside–down) Rook on the promotion square and continues the game, the piece is considered as a Rook, even if he names it as a “Queen” or any other piece. If he moves the upside-down rook diagonally, it becomes an illegal move.

Link: https://arbiters.fide.com/wp-content/uploads/Publications/Ma...

This is not a philosophical question about metaphysics, where the rook’s true essence can be converted to that of a queen because really, what are the queens and rooks anyway but abstract symbols? The rook is the physical object that everyone in the tournament hall recognizes as a rook, which nobody has a problem identifying in practice.

[opello]

That's interesting, but I wonder if it's not more accurate to say "tradition doesn't support the use of an inverted rook as a promoted queen's proxy" or "FIDE would prefer not using inverted rooks as a promoted queen proxy" instead? Unfortunately neither explain why this is the preference, but avoiding ambiguity for observers seems obvious.

My thinking is that if we take "many active tournament players will see it every year or two" as the absence of a strict prohibition, and that this description of how it is illegal occurs in the "Arbiters' Manual," which self-describes as guidelines for arbiters and in the preface explains that rules can't cover every situation which is why the arbiters exist, but not in the actual rules document, it seems less "illegal" and more "unadvised."

I did not wax metaphysical, quite the opposite with the desire to find a definition for how one identifies a given piece. I imagine there are some other tournament organizational guidelines which outlines how chess sets are chosen for official events. These conventions taken in aggregate would provide some perspective, but still not answer the original question. I wager that everyone in your tournament hall would also recognize the use of an inverted rook as a promoted queen. So if it's not a question of avoiding ambiguity, then I wonder again, "why?"

There is a shorter version of this reply, which I will now include below:

At the end of the table of contents there is another interesting note in an offset grey box, just like the box which contains the note you quoted above:

> IMPORTANT:

> Throughout this manual, text which appears in a box such as this one is given as advice and is the opinion of a number of experienced arbiters. It does not form part of the Laws nor the Regulations in which it appears.

[umanwizard]

> That's interesting, but I wonder if it's not more accurate to say "tradition doesn't support the use of an inverted rook as a promoted queen's proxy" or "FIDE would prefer not using inverted rooks as a promoted queen proxy" instead?

No, it is against the FIDE rules. Both the official rules, and the unofficial explanatory text in the Arbiter's Manual. The official rules say that chess sets contain a piece called a queen, and a piece called a rook. They do not say anything about a piece other than a queen becoming a queen if it is turned in a different orientation, so it should be obvious that it doesn't do so.

But even for those for whom that wasn't obvious, there is additionally the arbiter's manual, explaining that yes, this is in fact the interpretation of the rules that FIDE and senior arbiters believe to be correct.

Despite all this you are refusing to believe it's actually against the rules. I am not sure what else I can cite to convince you. Google, ask your favorite LLM, or ask a FIDE arbiter if you want -- everyone will agree that if you promote to a rook, it is a rook, regardless of whether it's upside down or not.

Nobody has written a formal definition of which piece in a chess set is "the rook" and which one is "the queen", because the FIDE rules were not written by formal logicians, and so it probably never occurred to them that this was necessary.

This simply never comes up. You are probably the only person in history from the founding of FIDE until now who has pretended not to know what a rook or a queen is.

> My thinking is that if we take "many active tournament players will see it every year or two" as the absence of a strict prohibition

I think you are misinterpreting that comment. They are saying those players will see a scenario with two queens of one color on the board every year or two, not that they'll see someone trying to use an upside-down rook to stand for one of them.

[opello]

> They are saying those players will see a scenario with two queens of one color on the board every year or two

That makes sense.

It seems to me that you've used a lot of truism reasoning out of frustration. I tried to head these off with my original assumption that it was a question of identity.

>> I anticipate the argument being one of identity, such as "a rook is a rook whether it is right side up or upside down." This is an argument of convention.

Since the reliance is on convention, and an inverted rook is conventionally treated as a promoted queen, the FIDE Arbiters' Manual describes a policy of not following this convention. I'm sure someone knows why this is the guidance. I was curious about that reasoning. It seemed interesting and worthy of discussion.

> You are probably the only person in history from the founding of FIDE until now who has pretended not to know what a rook or a queen is.

You ascribe to pretend ignorance what is in fact interest in the history of a thing. This seems unreasonably antagonistic.

I believe you've misunderstood my original comment and I do not know why, but I think I will be done with this thread. If you find out why this was the adopted guidance for the FIDE Arbiters' Manual I'd enjoy reading about it and I imagine others may too, but it should be put under the original question, not here.

[umanwizard]

> Since the reliance is on convention, and an inverted rook is conventionally treated as a promoted queen

I think that convention is much less strong than the conventional meaning of the piece shapes. I have only seen it in casual games, and I’m not sure if it exists in every country.

I don’t know why this rule was adopted, but I gave a few plausible reasons off the top of my head in another post on this thread.

[jibal]

I didn't "restate the premise", I said it was wrong, and added information. Since I wasn't present when the FIDE hammered out their rules, I don't know why they decided that upside down rooks can't be used as queens, and any speculation on my part would be no more authoritative than your own imagination.

I tried to be helpful and I got an aggressively hostile response. (And I see that the same happened to others here.) I won't make that mistake again.

[opello]

> I didn't "restate the premise", I said it was wrong, and added information.

You originally wrote:

> Btw, the upside-down-rook trick is illegal in serious play.

You followed up to my asking for an explanation why with:

> As stated it's wrong

It seems like a very low effort restatement to say "illegal" and then "wrong." Your additional details were about the FIDE rules, which do not seem to forbid using an inverted rook as a proxy for a promoted queen. If they do, please tell me which rule[1]. The pivot from "illegal" to "wrong" adds a moral aspect to the evaluation which seems bizarre.

> I tried to be helpful and I got an aggressively hostile response.

I'm sorry if my spinning of a hypothetical yarn about the argument being one of identity of the piece in question came across as "aggressively hostile." It was not my intention in the least.

> And I see that the same happened to others here.

I grant you the other thread got more antagonistic and that's disappointing. I will defend that I think that if you want to claim the rules forbid this act, you should be able to cite a rule, and not a guideline about general consensus. The former is clear, the latter is something more akin to "tradition."

I'm also, across both of these descendant threads, annoyed with responses not readily engaging with my legitimate inquiry about why forbidding the use of the inverted rook as a promoted queen proxy may be the case. It's a neat quirk or curiosity to me. And I'm barely a casual player. It seems like an elegant solution to piece availability and actually preserves game pace -- those are aspects of the elegance that seem obvious to me.

[1] https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf

[umanwizard]

> You followed up to my asking for an explanation why with:

>> As stated it's wrong

You misunderstood that comment. He was saying that my claim (that using an upside-down rook is illegal in serious play) is wrong as stated, because it's only true for FIDE rules, not USCF rules. He wasn't saying the act of using a rook that way is wrong (morally or otherwise).

> if you want to claim the rules forbid this act, you should be able to cite a rule

No, this isn't how rules work. The rules of a board game describe all the ways you're allowed to move the pieces, under what circumstances pieces can become other pieces, and so on. If some piece transformation isn't discussed in the rules, then it's not allowed. Otherwise, I could on a random turn say "I declare all my pawns to now be queens". There's no specific rule that says you can't do that, but nevertheless, the rules forbid it implicitly by not mentioning it. Similarly, the fact that they never mention that a rook can become a queen means that in fact, it can't.

So in fact the rule you're looking for is on page 7 of the PDF you linked:

> If a player having the move [...] promotes a pawn, the choice of the piece is finalised, when the piece has touched the square of promotion.

"The piece". Not a different piece having been turned upside down.

Let's take an analogy to real-world laws. Imagine you live in a country that says apples are taxed at 1 cent per apple. Now, imagine a shop turns all the apples upside-down, and declares that they consider upside-down apples to actually be bananas, so they don't have to pay the tax. Is this legal? No! Even though the law doesn't mention anything about whether you can or can't do that, nor does it give a mathematically precise definition of what an apple or banana is. Even though it's not explicitly forbidden, it is still not allowed.

> I'm also, across both of these descendant threads, annoyed with responses not readily engaging with my legitimate inquiry about why forbidding the use of the inverted rook as a promoted queen proxy may be the case. It's a neat quirk or curiosity to me

In another subthread I gave five plausible reasons why it makes sense not to allow it. Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512086

[opello]

> You misunderstood that comment.

You are absolutely right, I misread that entirely. Thanks. I also misattributed the original comment and the follow-up to the same author.

The problem with pursuing "identity" is that these rules don't anchor the identity of pieces so far as I can tell. If the players agree that for expediency the inverted rook is a queen, the move notation would call it a queen, it would in fact be a queen for the purposes of that game. The only way anyone could tell which token was used in place of a normative queen shaped piece would be if there were video or photographs of the actual board at that phase of the game. And it doesn't affect those other people. In a formal setting it seems like an arbiter or judge or proctor or whomever should also be informed for accurate record keeping.

The fruit analogy raises the stakes to fraud while the use in a game, unless a player tried to cheat, is inconsequential to those players.

[umanwizard]

> The problem with pursuing "identity" is that these rules don't anchor the identity of pieces so far as I can tell.

Again, the identity of objects is assumed in all sets of rules or laws, as the apple/banana example was intended to show. When you write the rules for board games, you do not need to re-derive the entire foundations of metaphysics and discuss what it really means for an object to have identity. You assume these words have the normal meanings commonly associated with them.

> The only way anyone could tell which token was used in place of a normative queen shaped piece would be if there were video or photographs of the actual board at that phase of the game.

Whether people can tell that a rule was violated has no bearing on whether or not it was actually violated. I thought we were talking about what the rules say, not how easy or difficult they are to enforce. Of course if you are by yourself and there are no spectators or official arbiters then you can do whatever you want; nobody is going to stop you.

> In a formal setting it seems like an arbiter or judge or proctor or whomever should also be informed for accurate record keeping.

But if you're already pausing the clock to inform the arbiter anyway, why can't the arbiter just give you another queen? I thought the entire point of this whole rook-as-queen exercise was to avoid having to stop the game and talk to the arbiter?

> The fruit analogy raises the stakes to fraud while the use in a game, unless a player tried to cheat, is inconsequential to those players.

We're not talking about the stakes or importance. I agree that what token chess players use as the queen is less meaningful than actual crimes, but that wasn't the point of the analogy.

[jibal]

> You originally wrote:

>> Btw, the upside-down-rook trick is illegal in serious play.

No I didn't. I won't engage in conversation with someone who doesn't even track who said what.

[opello]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45520037

I was mistaken and ultimately recognized that as well as being told I misidentified the antecedent of your "As stated it's wrong."