Theory Specialist Devastated After Opponent Plays Move Five of Unprepared Sideline

The tab is cut from a blue plastic divider with scissors that were not made for plastic, and the ballpoint has pressed through it: POISONED PAWN (B97). Behind it sit sixty more, each one a variation Arne Pell has taken to a depth his opponents decline to visit.

Pell, 54, has played the Najdorf Poisoned Pawn for eleven years. He has a prepared novelty on move fourteen of the 8...Qxb2 line, which he has never once reached in a rated game, because reaching it requires an opponent to cooperate for thirteen moves.

In round three of the club championship, playing Black in a 90+30, he did not get to move six. After 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6, Deniz Aksoy played 5.Bc4, and the clock transcript shows twenty-two minutes going on the fifth move. Pell's answer, 5...e6, was legal, sensible and entirely unprepared for.

"I had the tab," Pell said in the postmortem. "I had the tab, the variation, the novelty, and he declined to take any of it."

Aksoy, 1745, was not being difficult. "I've been meaning to learn the Najdorf properly for two years," he said. "I got to move five and stopped. Bc4 was the last thing I remembered."

The binder's one page on the Sozin, a photocopy from a 1979 volume, was wrong. Pell asked the arbiter whether an opponent was obliged to signal that he was leaving theory. The arbiter declined to extend the touch-move rule to cover stationery.

In my margin: Article 4.3 governs a hand that has touched a piece. No article governs a hand that has opened a binder.

Pell then asked the standards board to enter the game in the bulletin under B97, on the grounds that it had been prepared as B97. Inez Gable's ruling arrived the same evening: "The ECO code describes the moves that occurred, Mr. Pell, not the ones you were bracing for."

By the following morning the file existed anyway, in an envelope from Basil Holloway's shop: forty-one pages of Sozin, tabbed, eighteen dollars, and on its first line, 5...e6. "It's the same file everybody has," Basil said. "The difference is mine is tabbed."

On the club's message thread, someone ran the position at move five to depth 24, put +0.34 beside it, and explained that +0.34 meant the game had been lost before it began, which it does not mean. The practical consequence needed no decimals: Pell reached move thirty with four minutes and twelve seconds, played a rook move he later called "instant" in a drawn position, and flagged.

In round four, Pell is Black again. The binder has a new tab, hand-lettered in the same ballpoint: SOZIN (B22). It currently holds one page, the printout, and the first line of the printout is the move he played with sixty-eight minutes still on his clock.