Unconditional Moves.

I have noticed sometimes that when a game is unequivocally won that a person will just stop moving.

Rather then conceding the loss and resigning or at least playing the game out they will do there best to slow the game to the very edge of the time controls.

The best way to combat this of course is with conditional moves. However sometimes they will have eight or more completely irrelevant moves that they can make the result of which is that I will make exactly the same move.

And sometimes it might be 5 or more moves from the forced mate or from the pawn queening etc. Thus I need to put 40 or more different variations of the exactly the same thing into the conditional moves to allow me to ignore the game.

I think that it should be possible to make what may be called unconditional moves. Moves that what ever the opponent does I will do such and such... Pushing a pawn to the endzone is probably the most likely.

Anyhow I don't know if perhaps this is difficult to do due to programming problems or if it has merely been over looked but I think it would most certainly add something to this site in terms of user friendliness which as a commercial site is more or less the end goal of all actions.


Charlie

This comes up a bit in tedious endgames, especially where the openent is stalling to run you out of time. It's just too slow to crank out all the conditions when only one of them, if you got them all, will be played.

Unconditional moves are a special case that does come up. It would also be good to be able to control the trigger for a conditional move to have more cases where it is played rather than just 1 move or any move.

E.g. let the user choose the squares to look at and the piece, or lack of one, that should be on those squares to trigger the conditional move. That way the current behaviour is to look at all 64 squares, unconditional move is to look at none. If what you want is "any king move" then you select just the square the king is on and the move is played when that square is empty. etc.

If you get it wrong or the opponent suspects you are using uncoditionals then they may make moves that you would not have considered to get an advantage but it is just bad luck if you use the feature badly.