Originally posted by Nordlys
I don't think there has ever been a tradition for that...
I had a friend that I always warned him when I was going to take a piece from him. He couldn't always able to protect it, but he learned a lot from it.
In a café in Paris, I stumbled over some people having a good game of chess. They had somewhat different rules of chess, probably not sanctionned by FIDE. Instead of just check the king you have to say "Cheque au roi". And when you threattened the queen, you hade to say "Cheque à la dame". If you forgot it, then you couldnt take the queen, and the king could safely stay where it were.
They also have the rule that in the first move, you could move one pawn two steps (as we can usually do), *or* move two pawns one step each (which was out of the ordinary, I'd say).
I never new what other rules applied, I didn't know even if I could do 'en passant' or not.
Well, we had fun...