is promoting all of your extra pawns to knights good sportsmanship in tournaments?

''I think it is completely acceptable to do so, since the opponent is already being disrespectful by playing on in a dead lost position.''

i agree but i find that kinda dumb to not try for the faster checkmate: there is still a possibility of stalemate etc...

Some people overdo it and hit the 300 move limit. So everything, including fun in won positions, has a limit. It's not necessary to queen all your extra pawns. Maybe one or two is enough. Then just go for the checkmate.
However, looking at the game @achja posted, you need 6 knights to checkmate the king. That takes lots of unnecessary wood pushing work promoting at least 4 extra pawns. That's very inefficient.

depends on your opponent. if you're playing a child -- well, many children are taught to never resign. if that's the case, just play it out to mate, tbh.

one time i was paired with an eight year old asian girl - who, in fairness, was rated like 1750 - but i managed to win the exchange against her, which transformed into being up two bishops in the endgame. she wanted to play it out to mate though, so i just mated her with my extra material.

against an adult though, do whatever you want. there's no other reason, as far as i can tell, anyone should play out a +50 position, or whatever.

@ JushBJJ2 Since you are playing in a scholastic tournament, it isn’t really disrespectful of your opponent to be playing until mate as most kids do (I think someone else in forum mentioned this). Thus, you should respect your opponent and avoid the torture. If you have multiple pawns, I suggest promoting into two queens to win...that should be simplest.

Absolutely acceptable and you should do so if allowed. Because that means your opponent disrespect you in the first place.

You may search my games and find several dozens of games where I mate my opponent by knighs only (that is, 3,4,5,6,7,8, and may be 9 and 10 knights). May be I have mates by 2 knights, he-he. I mean human players, not the engine at weakest level.

In fact, I am hosting a team lichess.org/team/mate-by-knights-only

Just to answer the topic starter's question: my opponent is free to resign if he does not like this kind of game.

But mates by knights only looks aesthetic. And yes, sometimes I tryed to make it look more aesthetic and got stalemates.

Fight bad style with worse style!

Here is an example of nice looking mate:



> Fight bad style with worse style!

Good style is for puzzles.

I just have read the neighbour thread lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/your-best-checkmate

So my next acheivment should be to mate by knights only in the middle of the board, not at the edge.

@Sarg0n do you really consider the position above as "worse style" ?