“If any” in ‘daily’ games

Chess dot com’s ‘daily’ games with time controls of days rather than seconds — in the ancient days, we sent postcards back and forth, and called it ‘postal chess’) (I think lichess dot org calls it ‘correspondence chess’, another way lichess is preferable to chessdotcom — lacks the “if any” feature in its conditional move function.

In postal play, you could save a few days or a few cents on a postcard with conditional moves. “If you do this, I’ll do that”. Chess dot com daily has a conditionals button, but the old postcard routine also enabled “whatever you do, I’ll do this”.

I could’ve used “if any” for this game, in which Black won’t resign:

No matter what Black does, I’m queening next. (Though if he goes …Na6-b4 or …Na6-c5, queening gives him a check on d3.) Instead, I clicked the “new line” button seven times to make one conditional, plus seven alternatives. “If any” would’ve been a helpful feature.

A player has to be careful with that, though. Once upon a time, a postal player replied to 1. d4 with 1…g6 and “if any, 2…Bg7”. He expected the natural moves like 2. e4, 2. Nf3, whatnot. Instead, White played 2. Bh6 Bg7 3. Bxg7 +-.

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