Since the incident related in the post I'm replying to, I have indeed abstained from playing untimed chess games against strangers (I think I gave in just once, and that game was a perfectly friendly one), and I've had much better experiences that way. However, there is still room for the odd maladjusted brat.

Yesterday I was playing a game with someone who was holding his own until the end game, and then I swiped a decisive advantage. He was down to a king and a couple of unadvanced pawns, while I had a rook, a pawn about to queen, and another pawn blocking his pawns. He paused for a long while, then played another couple of moves, and then started barraging me with requests to cancel the game, then requests to save the game for later (yeah, I'm sure he'd show up later to finish it), and requests to call it a draw. The idea, I presume, is that I slip with the mouse and hit 'yes' instead of 'no,' he's in luck. The beauty of it, though, is that I don't have to do anything; his clock is still ticking, and when it expires, he's lost the game.

So, comforted in the knowledge that he could do nothing that would let him get away with it but thoroughly disgusted at his discourteous behavior, I said, "Resign, stupid."

"how about a draw, and then we play 1 minute game?"

"How about you resign? Or just leave the table so I can wait ten minutes?"

"how about i send you a virus!!!!!!!!!!"

"LOL"

"to your computer"

"I'm a computer science major, and a software engineer by trade. Go for it."

Pause. Then another barrage of cancel requests, draw requests, and save requests. He just starts hammering that 'cancel' button as fast as he can. The applet is smart, though. I only get one dialog, so when he's finished, I hit the one 'no' button, and that's the end of that.

So then he swears and leaves. By that time his timer had gone quite a bit under ten minutes, so I didn't even have to wait the usual amount of time before getting the win.

I have to say, those game applets on Yahoo are set up pretty well. People can try to be petty and screw you over, but they generally can't get away with it.

So far, according to the statistics they have on me, I've played something like 300 chess games on Yahoo. So even though it seems like I run into an astounding number of idiots, I've had pretty good luck. Maybe 20 people have bailed on me, making me wait a few minutes before I get to win by default. Maybe 5 have barraged me with cancel requests when the games were doomed. Only one, so far, as ever threatened to send me a "virus!!!!!!!!!!!!" (To my computer, even!)