Here is a link to the DRAFT 2018 rulebook document. It is currently being reviewed by the Rules Committee. Before it gets sent off to US Chess having a few more eyes proof read this document is probably a good idea. Remember the document reflects the rules changes that were passed by the Delegates–and that is all. Future or proposed or wannabe rules changes are not part of this document.
It appears to be extremely well thought out, for the most part.
I did notice one small apparent typo, on page 5:
Rule 5F2a1: Variation: How the organizer may specify a different time control for Non-increment (should be Non-delay, right?) clocks.
– since the entirety of 5F2 (5F2, 5F2a, 5F2a1) is about delay, not increment.
More later.
Bill Smythe
Here’s another question: On page 30, under Errata, the correction states:
Blitz: Total playing time for each player is from 5 to 10 minutes inclusive and the primary time control must be at least 3 minutes. 5 <= mm+ss <= 10. …
– where mm is main time in minutes, and ss is increment or delay time in seconds.
Thus, there is a minimum main time (3 minutes) as well as a specified range (5 through 10) for main time plus increment/delay time.
Are there not similar specifications for slower events, as well? For regular, I thought minimum main time was 25 minutes and minimum main-plus-increment/delay was 30.
And for quick, I thought minimum main time was 8 minutes and the main-plus-increment/delay range was 11 through 29.
Yet, for dual-rated, the corrected Errata says only:
Dual (both regular and quick): Total playing time for each player is from 30 to 65 minutes (30 <= mm+ss <= 65).
– with no mention of a minimum main time.
Does this mean that, for example, a permissible control for regular would now be G/3 inc/30, or G/2 inc/30, or G/1 inc/30? (Those G/mm times are minutes, not hours.) How about G/0 inc/30?
Or is it just that these are just the Errata, and the full specs are elsewhere? I may be barking up a non-existent tree.
Bill Smythe
In connection with the above, the following appears on page 8 of the draft:
5E2. Organizer fails to specify increment or delay.
If the organizer fails to specify an increment or delay time in the time control (which may be zero to indicate no increment or delay), the minimum recommended delay specified in rule 5E shall apply.
What if this pushes the total time (mm+ss) over the maximum for the intended tournament type?
For example, if the organizer lists G/29 with no mention of increment or delay, he probably intended the event to be quick-rated. Yet G/29 d/3 would push mm+ss up to 32, making the event regular-rated (or dual-rated) instead.
Perhaps there should be a clause reducing the main time, only if necessary and only to the extent necessary? For example, G/29 would become G/26 d/3.
Or perhaps it isn’t worth the bother, because of how seldom it would happen.
Bill Smythe
I will need to fix this. Nice catch.
I can find no mention of the minimum main time for the categories you point out in any document. I suspect the Rules Committee or the Delegates will need to address this issue in the future.
I can find nothing in any document that addresses your questions–sigh. Another topic for the Rules Committee or Delegates? Your G/29 becoming G/26 + d/3 example above has been used for a few years now by some organizers/TDs.
Not sure where it’s documented, but my understanding is that mm must be 3 or greater for Blitz events and 5 or greater for Quick, Dual or Regular events.
As stated in rule 5C, the base time has to be at least 5 minutes for regular, dual, and quick time controls.
Good job finding that. All I did was search the rulebook for one term. Now I can see I should have used a different search term. Time to improve my skill set to catch up to yours!
That’s pretty incredible, though. 5 minutes main time is enough for regular, as long as the increment or delay is at least 25 seconds ??
I thought the idea was – but maybe the idea got washed out somewhere along the way – that no more than 5 seconds (regular), 3 seconds (quick), or 2 seconds (blitz) of increment or delay could contribute toward the mm+ss minimum total of 30 minutes regular, 11 minutes quick, or 5 minutes blitz.
That way the minimum mm (by itself) would be 25 regular, 8 quick, and 3 blitz.
Bill Smythe
That may have been the idea when hardly anyone used increment or delay longer than 5 seconds. It’s not what got written into the rulebook!
And that is fodder for future ADMs. Right now the draft of the 2018 rules update document is posted at the link provided so that there is a window of time to make adjustments to the update document before it gets passed along to US Chess.
Surprisingly, there are 49 events that show up in MSA if you search for a time control of ‘G/5’;d25’, most if not all organized by one affiliate.
But as noted upthread, that’s permissible under the current rules and will be permissible in 2018 as well.
As I recall, a suggestion was made some years back that in dual rated games the first/only time control, ie, the MM part of MM+SS, should be no less than 25 and in regular-only rated games it should be no less than either 30 or possibly 45, but I think the Rules Committee shot that suggestion down.
I’m old enough to remember when 30 minutes was the minimum for ANY time control period (and some people complained that 30 minutes was too short.)
I continue to be perturbed by this notion that the Rules Committee and/or the Delegates may have endorsed “upside down” time controls like G/5 d/25 regular, and G/5 d/24 quick.
And I continue to believe that these strange endorsements came about because some ADMs were interpreted by the Rules Committee in ways not intended by the original ADM sponsors.
Unfortunately, ADMs often look as though they were written in a vacuum, out of context and/or without specifics. Sometimes there is no mention of which rule number is proposed to be modified or replaced.
It then becomes up to Tim Just and/or David Kuhns and/or Ken Ballou and/or others to try to put the pieces together and find an appropriate context for the proposed changes within the existing rules. This task, of course, can become nearly impossible at times. I do not envy any individuals for the position they find themselves in, nor blame them for the resulting problems. But stuff happens.
Now, what makes me think “stuff” happened in this case? For me, two pieces of evidence from relatively recent history point the way:
- the drive, by Steve Immitt and others, to make G/25 d/5 regular-ratable, and
- the desire by several, including me, to make G/3 inc/2 blitz-ratable.
First let’s look at (A) G/25 d/5. (This is the right side up version, not the “upside down” G/5 d/25.)
Originally, the legal range of time controls had been a function of the main time alone, with the delay time not being a factor. For a regular-rated event the minimum main time was G/30. But many organizers of G/30 events subtracted 5 minutes of main time and added a delay, making the actual time G/25 d/5.
Later, the practice of subtracting main time to compensate for the delay became frowned upon, casting doubt upon the status (regular vs quick) of G/25 d/5. Organizers wanted these events to continue to be regular-rated, so they begged the Rules Committee and the Delegates to allow 5 seconds of delay time to substitute for 5 minutes of main time. Thus the concept of mm + ss was born (main time in minutes plus delay time in seconds).
This idea at first drew howls of protest from some Delegates (and perhaps from some Rules Committee members, I don’t know). A typical attitude was “30 minutes is already too fast, we certainly shouldn’t shorten it even more”.
Finally, G/25 d/5 was passed, but there was a general feeling that enough was enough, and that no further encroachments should be made, not even G/20 d/10, let alone the completely upside-down G/5 d/25.
So now I’m supposed to believe that the Delegates, in just a year or two, went from barely passing G/25 d/5, to enthusiastically endorsing the upside-down G/5 d/25 ?? Sorry, but I don’t buy it.
Now let’s look at (B) G/3 inc/2. When blitz ratings were first introduced, many Delegates (and probably some Rules Committee members) felt that anything faster than 5 minutes was too fast, even for blitz, and even with a 2-second increment attached.
So the Delegates passed a rule that all rated games, including blitz, must be played with a main time of 5 minutes or more. Apparently this became 5C or something like that. I’m sure this was never intended to mean that 5 minutes main time was allowable for regular or quick. The 5-minute minimum was intended, I’m sure, as a supplementary rule, to be enforced along with existing rules specifying main-time minimums for regular and quick.
Later, as G/3 inc/2 was becoming the international standard for blitz, the Delegates finally woke up and figured out that the minimum main time for blitz should be 3 minutes instead of 5. This change made the aforementioned rule 5C obsolete, so it could have been (and should have been) rescinded, leaving the existing main-time minimums in effect.
Instead, 5C was modified to a pointless version that simply changed the blitz minimum from 5 to 3. With this change, the blitz portion of 5c became a mere corollary (i.e. direct consequence) of the brand-new 3-minute minimum mentioned above, while the regular/quick portion of 5c remained redundant, because it was less restrictive than the existing minimums for regular and quick.
With 5c now looking redundant (or worse) in its entirety, some people (apparently) thought it was intended to replace, rather than supplement, the existing main-time minimums. Thus was born yet another urban legend – or rather, a second version of the one born in (A) above – that made the upside-down G/5 d/25 look legal as a regular time control.
Magically, the former pointless-looking 5C had become elevated to the status of a main rule, mowing down everything else in its path.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how “stuff” happens. Or at least how “stuff” appears to have happened in this case.
I would hope that each member of the Rules Committee who participated in the production of DRAFT 2018 would see fit to carefully review all recent intra-Committee emails, relevant recent ADMs, this and earlier Forum threads, and their own memories and consciences, to try to determine whether there is a high likelihood that the Delegates never endorsed the upside-down G/5 d/25 time control.
I’m not sure what “high likelihood” should mean. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” (95% likelihood)? “By a preponderance of evidence” (51% likelihood)? Or halfway between, like 73%?
If there is a “high likelihood”, perhaps this draft could be revised, and we could get rid of G/5 d/25 right away. If, on the other hand, there is fear that the Delegates may actually have endorsed this control, then of course it would be necessary to wait until the August 2018 Delegates meeting, in which case we’d be stuck with this weird time control until January 2019.
Proceed with caution – I guess.
Bill Smythe
I’m very confused. Was Mr. Smythe a delegate at the (I believe) 2010 U.S. Open where we strangled the horrible practice of reducing the main time to compensate players who refused to purchase standard clocks? If not, I’m curious as to where he derived the above. I was at that meeting and recall very different circumstances.
Alex Relyea
No, I wasn’t there, but I’m glad that horrible practice was strangled.
It’s just that, in all the Delegate meeting minutes and Forum posts over the years, I have never seen anything that made me realize that more than 5 seconds of increment/delay could be used to substitute for main minutes in the mm + ss formula. And time controls like G/5 d/25 (for regular) simply seem ridiculous to me. I doubt if I’m the only one, either. Somehow, something slipped in there without a lot of us realizing it. Maybe I just missed a bunch of stuff.
Bill Smythe
There was a time, back before 2009, I think, when having at least X seconds of increment/delay meant that the event was regular rated, regardless of other factors I think that X was 16 seconds (corrected after a reminder from someone with a better memory than mine.) (I’m fairly sure that rule change was made in Dallas in 2008, taking effect in 2009.)
Whether the current system of adding MM and SS together is an improvement is arguable, but I think it is at least more consistent (and thus easier to track/enforce) than that previous rule.
I wouldn’t play in a tournament with that time control. I wouldn’t direct one. But I fail to see why my preferences with regards to this should get codified into the rules. I could easily see some people feeling that (say) G/15 d/15 would be a very playable short time control.
Well, at least the current system (including G/5 d/25 being legal as regular) has the advantage that any time control is ratable under one, and only one (regular, quick, or blitz) system, as long as mm >= 3 and mm+ss >= 5. There’s a sort of ugly consistency there, I guess.
Bill Smythe