> That's interesting, but I wonder if it's not more accurate to say "tradition doesn't support the use of an inverted rook as a promoted queen's proxy" or "FIDE would prefer not using inverted rooks as a promoted queen proxy" instead?
No, it is against the FIDE rules. Both the official rules, and the unofficial explanatory text in the Arbiter's Manual. The official rules say that chess sets contain a piece called a queen, and a piece called a rook. They do not say anything about a piece other than a queen becoming a queen if it is turned in a different orientation, so it should be obvious that it doesn't do so.
But even for those for whom that wasn't obvious, there is additionally the arbiter's manual, explaining that yes, this is in fact the interpretation of the rules that FIDE and senior arbiters believe to be correct.
Despite all this you are refusing to believe it's actually against the rules. I am not sure what else I can cite to convince you. Google, ask your favorite LLM, or ask a FIDE arbiter if you want -- everyone will agree that if you promote to a rook, it is a rook, regardless of whether it's upside down or not.
Nobody has written a formal definition of which piece in a chess set is "the rook" and which one is "the queen", because the FIDE rules were not written by formal logicians, and so it probably never occurred to them that this was necessary.
This simply never comes up. You are probably the only person in history from the founding of FIDE until now who has pretended not to know what a rook or a queen is.
> My thinking is that if we take "many active tournament players will see it every year or two" as the absence of a strict prohibition
I think you are misinterpreting that comment. They are saying those players will see a scenario with two queens of one color on the board every year or two, not that they'll see someone trying to use an upside-down rook to stand for one of them.
> They are saying those players will see a scenario with two queens of one color on the board every year or two
That makes sense.
It seems to me that you've used a lot of truism reasoning out of frustration. I tried to head these off with my original assumption that it was a question of identity.
>> I anticipate the argument being one of identity, such as "a rook is a rook whether it is right side up or upside down." This is an argument of convention.
Since the reliance is on convention, and an inverted rook is conventionally treated as a promoted queen, the FIDE Arbiters' Manual describes a policy of not following this convention. I'm sure someone knows why this is the guidance. I was curious about that reasoning. It seemed interesting and worthy of discussion.
> You are probably the only person in history from the founding of FIDE until now who has pretended not to know what a rook or a queen is.
You ascribe to pretend ignorance what is in fact interest in the history of a thing. This seems unreasonably antagonistic.
I believe you've misunderstood my original comment and I do not know why, but I think I will be done with this thread. If you find out why this was the adopted guidance for the FIDE Arbiters' Manual I'd enjoy reading about it and I imagine others may too, but it should be put under the original question, not here.
> Since the reliance is on convention, and an inverted rook is conventionally treated as a promoted queen
I think that convention is much less strong than the conventional meaning of the piece shapes. I have only seen it in casual games, and I’m not sure if it exists in every country.
I don’t know why this rule was adopted, but I gave a few plausible reasons off the top of my head in another post on this thread.