Chess Score Sheet: Fill & Download for Free

I witnessed this once happen in a tournament. A player made his move, then prepared to get up to walk around. However, someone had left a bag behind his chair; in the motion of sliding his chair back it caught on the bag and started to fall backwards.Instinctively, the player reached forward to grab the table to steady himself. The table was flimsy; the table leg he grabbed buckled and the table leg collapsed. Two chess boards (including his own and his neighbors) slid down into a heap of boards, pieces, and clocks.Fortunately, it was determined to simply be an accident and no penalty was assessed. In a manner of minutes the table was set up again and players resumed their games as if nothing had happened.That’s a good reason to always keep an accurate score sheet.

This incident happened like million years ago when I was in the U-12 category, and I was playing in the National event for the age category in Chennai, India, and I was playing against someone who was weaker in strength than me.I had the white pieces, and by around move 30, I was clearly winning, so I decided to go to the restroom, to take a leak, and when I come back a few minutes later, I am surprised looking at my position, as some of my pieces are missing and the position on the board looks completely lost to me.I look at my score sheet, and I see a bunch of horrible blunder moves written in the score sheet, with a black or green ink pen, whereas the pen I was using was a blue ink pen.I called the Arbiter, and explained to him, that these were not moves that I had played, and something has gone wrong, and the Arbiter looks at the scoresheet of my opponent and finds all his moves written in green/black ink pen, and a bunch of moves in my scoresheet written with his pen.The arbiter figures out something is fishy due to the different ink color and realizes that this cheating was a handiwork of my opponent, The arbiter cross checks with players from the nearby boards who tell they have no idea, what happened in my board.My opponent was let go with a warning, and we resumed from the position, which was on the scoresheet before I left to take a leak, and I won the game in few more moves.It's for another day the story that how I think this opponent was an age-cheater which was a rampant practice in Indian chess when I was growing up.

Here are three more:According to Hans Kmoch and Fred Reinfeld, in 1922 during the Vienna tournament, Alexander Alekhine resigned a game against Ernst Gruenfeld by taking his king and throwing it across the room (I wonder if he thought that saying “I resign” was not enough to make it clear he was resigning).Kmoch also mentions another incident, told to him by Friederich Saemisch. This time it was Aaron Nimzowitsch in a tournament in Berlin (the actual tournament location and year is contested, however). He played against Saemisch on the last round of the tournament. This loss cost him the first place (and prize) of the tournament. Playing a completely lost position, Nimzowitsch climbed the table, stood up and shouted “That I should lose to this idiot!” (you can only wonder if he knew what losing to an “idiot” implied about him).In the 1974 match between Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov, in the 21st game, in a certain moment of the game Korchnoi left his seat, went to the arbiter and asked him if he could castle kingside in that position, since he had all valid conditions, but his kingside rook was attacked. The arbiter (I imagine quite amused) assured him he could. Korchnoi himself recounts this story in his book “Chess is My Life”. In his defense, he later mentioned he knew the rules, but the issue was that the way chess rules were written in Russian left the situation a little ambiguous.I’ll also share with you an absurd thing that happened to me during an official game: I was white and we were playing on classical format. It was a tough game and we used a lot of time for each move. By move 39, we had but a few seconds each. I quickly made my move, hit the clock and waited. My opponent sank in thought. His flag fell. I did not say anything to him but waited a few seconds (I was going to tell him his time was up the moment he made his move). Fortunately, an arbiter was close by, looked at the clock, saw my score sheet and stopped the game, giving me the victory. My opponent protested, claiming that we had reached time control. The arbiter showed him my score sheet with his 40th move pending and he claimed that I had skipped a move, since his score sheet showed my move was move 41. He then showed his score sheet, which was really messy (he had crossed out several incorrect moves, writing the correct ones wherever he could find some space) and due to this he had his 39th move written in the 40th move box (he even had left the boxes from move 23 with crossed out moves and no reference as to where the correct moves were). The arbiter somehow read it, compared it to mine and confirmed his call. Yet my opponent did not agree. After discussing for several minutes with the arbiter (and being asked to lower his voice a few times because there were other games still ongoing), the arbiter asked him to replay the game using his score sheet. It was so messy that he was unable to do so, but still he did not believe he had lost on time, so we decided to replay the game using my score sheet (and having him follow it on his), counting each move out loud. We reached our final position and he was again told that this was move 39. Believe it or not, he started looking for a missing move in our score sheets, then on the board. He claimed we had missed a move and had us replay the whole thing again. Twice! Then, at the final position, he counted the moves on both sheets, counted again, stared at the board for a couple more minutes, and finally agreed that he had lost on time and left. This whole thing took more than 30 minutes. I found it absurd that he kept complaining even after he could not reproduce the game using his own score sheet. Even more absurd was that he made us replay the game twice (so a total of 3 times).EDIT: Thanks for all the views and the upvotes!