[Retros] How many times could a Diagram be repeated during a proofgame?

[raosorio at fibertel.com.ar]

Hi,

Thanks to Alexander and Tom for their comments.
They are wright having in mind I made a not proper presentation. Sorry, I assumed that being this a retro forum it would be understood by default that I was referring "under retro conventions"  but it was a mistake to state "legal" game. This suggests "real game", where the draw rules have to be claimed.

Let's start again and present the issue as a retro problem.  There are many examples of retros
(in the FIDE albums for  instance) showing that we agree on the automatic aplication of the draw
rules in this type of problems. 

PRESENTATION
Let's define "Diagram" just as a board showing pieces on it, i.e., no matter at all anything regarding the right's status, not even who's to move. I present the following Diagram,

r3k2r/8/2b5/Pp6/5BpP/8/8/R3K2R (just an example with the mimimal material)

Questions:

a) How many times could the Diagram have been repeated during the proofgame?

b) How many retractions are needed to show these repetitions?  

(all the above following the retro conventions)

I will post my own answers in few days but it would be interesting to have
further interaction first (of course I could still be missing something).

Best,
Roberto Osorio

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If "legal" means _legal under FIDE tournament rules_, then I believe the answer to your first question, (a), is "Infinitely many times"; that is, there is no upper bound to the number of times a position may be repeated.  I posted my reasons on ChessProblem.net a while back, and you can find them here: <http://chessproblem.net/viewtopic.php?t=127>.

Regards,

Alexander George

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I agree completely with Alexander.  As some relatively recent correspondence 
discussed, neither the repeated-position draw nor the 
50-moves-without-pawn-move-or-capture draw are automatic (see FIDE Rules of Chess 9.2 and 9.3).

Tom Volet