Rule 7.5
The teacher who usually runs the chess tournament was home with flu, so on Saturday morning the rulebook, the clipboard and the whistle went to Rowan.
Rowan is fourteen. He had read the rulebook twice that week, which was two times more than anyone else in the sports hall.
For three rounds nothing happened. Then, on board six, a boy from the Marbury team lifted his king two squares and dropped his rook down beside it, fast, while Yusuf was still writing the last move on his sheet.
“You're in check,” Yusuf said. “You can't castle out of check.”
“Clock's running,” the Marbury boy said, and pressed it.
That's the trick. Say it quickly, press the clock, and hope the other player is too polite to stop the game. Yusuf was too upset to be polite. His voice went up, thirty faces turned, and he put his hand flat on the board and said Rowan's name twice.
Somebody had to judge it, and today somebody was Rowan.
His hands were shaking as he walked over, so he put them behind his back. “Tell me what happened.” Both boys told him at the same time, so he made them do it again, one at a time.
Then he opened the rulebook at the page he had folded down on Tuesday, because he'd thought something like this might come up, and he read the castling rule out loud in the flattest voice he had. A king in check cannot castle. The move was illegal.
Then he stated what happened next, and quoted that too. “Rule 7.5. The illegal move is taken back, the king has to move if there's a legal square, and the opponent gets two extra minutes.”
The Marbury boy said everyone plays it that way in fast games. Rowan said this wasn't a fast game, and that anyway it wasn't true.
“Where does it say that?”
Rowan turned the book around and put his finger on the line.
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Then the Marbury boy moved his king one square sideways, Rowan added two minutes to Yusuf's clock and told them to play on, and board six went quiet again.
He walked back to the arbiter's table, sat down, and noticed that his hands had stopped shaking.