Extracting Danny Boy's urine

From the last round of the farcical European Championships at Plovdiv there comes an amusing reductio ab absurdum of "Danny Boy" Danailov's no-draw rules. These rules themselves resemble Churchill's description of Soviet foreign policy as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". Nobody seems to be able to explain exactly what the rules say. The one thing that seems clear is that draws cannot be agreed inside 40 moves, without the arbiter's agreement.

But what about threefold repetitions? In round 8, the top board game was drawn in 16 moves, after the players engineered a well-known repetition in the Berlin Wall. But that same day, Safarli and Baron were double-defaulted, after they repeated three times and then signed the scoresheet - their crime, apparently, was failing to consult an arbiter, before signing. Like Mafia bosses, Danny Boy's arbiters are big on "respect", it seems. But then in the final round yesterday, Bologan and Malakhov repeated three times, and called the arbiter, only to be refused permission to agree a draw anyway - on what grounds, only Don Corleone could say!

Anyway, forewarned is forearmed. Sebastian Maze and Ilya Smirin took no chances in their game. Having reached a position after 15 moves, in which they wished to draw, they then repeated moves - 13 times, all the way to move 40, whereupon they smoked the pipe of peace!