Which is what?
This is your thread. You (theoretically) are asking for advice. Have you actually read the replies?
Yes
Apparently not very carefully. Since you proposed 40/90,SD/30;inc30 as a possibility, why do you think that sessions longer than 4 hours are almost always done in (at least) two segments?
When I was in high school, our league played 30/30, SD/30. No need for a delay or increment because no one owned digital clocks, if they were even available then!
Alex Relyea
I will offer a dissenting opinion here. I am an “older” player (63), and I strongly prefer something like 40/90, SD/30, inc 30 (or d5) over any single time control, for two reasons:
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At least for the first 40 moves, I know exactly how much time per move I have available, and this makes it much easier to budget my time. It’s impossible to accurately budget your time (per move) for “the whole game”, because you don’t know how many moves that game will last.
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When I’m faced with an opponent who insists on using all of his time (or almost all of it) in the opening, having a first time control of 90 minutes (rather than a single time control of 120 minutes) forces him to start playing chess 30 minutes sooner, and reduces the amount of time I have to waste sitting there waiting for him to do so. I find the middlegame more interesting than the opening, and would rather not wait 2 hours + to get to it. Incidentally, for this same reason, I prefer d5 over inc 30 – the opponent is slightly less likely to squander most of his time if he doesn’t have a 30-second safety net. Having only 5 seconds per move gives him a bit more incentive to get going sooner.
As a TD, it doesn’t matter at all to me. I’m there all day no matter what the time control is.
I suppose it’s all well and good to ask for input here, but the bottom line is, which format will your particular audience prefer and actually show up for? And my personal experience with that is, you just have to try different things to find out. Every time I’ve tried a survey, players tell me one thing, but actually respond to (i.e. show up for) another.
If a lot of your longer format games are already a single time control and you want something even longer, I’d suggest using the 2-control format for variety and see what happens. You’ll get a better real life answer than whatever theoretical pros and cons you may glean here.
And you have to try each “different thing” multiple times, because random factors can also affect attendance. “It was raining that day.” “There was another big tournament just last week.” “It was my mother’s birthday.”
Try each one several times before drawing any conclusions.
Bill Smythe
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Too many organizers do things solely based on their preferences, and a result do things the same way all the time. Players do have different preferences, as do organizers, and the reasons for preferring one thing vs another are often of equal merit. Smart organizers know a large base will play almost any reasonable structure, and those who won’t may be on either side of a particular approach. They use variety.
Here in Wisconsin, our best attended tournaments are junior-only events, or events where juniors and adults are segregated in different sections (both events that I’m thinking of are two-day weekend events).
After that, single-day events (usually 4 games at G/60, d5) consistently get better attendance than two-day events.
I’m pretty sure neither of these has much to do with time controls, though. Apparently juniors like playing each other better than they like playing adults (and vice versa), and the one-day events have the obvious advantages of (1) no overnight stay, and therefore no hotel expense, and (2) leaving one day of the weekend free for other activities.
Our two-day events have various time controls. We have had only a few events with increment, so the jury is still out on those, but both 40/120, SD/60, d5 (or variations on this) and G/120, d5 (or variations on this) are common, and we often have both in the same tournament (early rounds are more likely to be single time controls, to avoid adjournments). As far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem to make much difference in attendance compared to the above-mentioned factors.
Personally, I prefer two or more time controls (reasons are detailed in a previous post), and I prefer longer time controls over shorter ones. I also don’t like one-day events. But I seem to be part of a shrinking minority.
Agreed. I’m convinced many an experiment has failed simply because the organizer didn’t give it a fair chance to take root and succeed.
For sure, but unless one has deep pockets (and/or a free site), low turnout might cause the quick demise of a format that might eventually prove popular, if not call a halt to the organizer’s activities.
We heard from an organizer the other day, he had just one person show up for his event, and that person came from a bordering state.
not sure you can draw that conclusion from your tournaments. are they state championship events? good prize fund? too many variables involved, i think, to distinctly conclude “juniors like playing each other better than they like playing adults (and vice versa),…”
…scot…
Overall, it appears that junior events that are oriented towards scholastic programs, with team or
grade-level prizes, seems to draw fairly well. While this tends to keep the young players in separate sections from adults, it’s not clear to me that the absence of adult opponents is a major drawing factor.
My experience suggests that adults don’t mind playing kids if they’re strong players and well-behaved, unless they’re also heavily under-rated, which, of course, they often are.
Events that pair a young player with an adult for prize purposes seem to be fairly popular as side events at nationals, I don’t know how many of them have been attempted in other situations.
In the Chicago area, most open tournaments attract about 50/50 adults and kids. I guess neither group has a problem playing the other.
Bill Smythe
You may be right. One of the events in question is a team event for the upper sections (high school) and individual for the lower sections, and it is unrated. Among Wisconsin tournaments with which I’m familiar, this format is unique. The other one is the Junior/Veterans tournament (you have to be under 21 to play in the junior, and over 18 to play in the veterans, so there is a small overlap). Other than that, it’s much like our other tournaments, except that the junior sections are used to determine our representatives in the three big national tournaments (Denker, Barber, and girls). So it’s unique in that respect. Both of these tournaments get at least twice as many entries as any other state tournament, but it’s true that there are other factors going on beside age group segregation.
As far as playing “out of your age group”, I haven’t talked to any juniors about this, so that part is speculation. I know quite a few adults who don’t like to play kids, though. The major factor here might be that many kids are underrated, as you mention. That doesn’t especially bother me, but I’m not particularly ambitious about my rating. At my age (and with my lack of ambition), it’s unlikely to ever get very far above my floor regardless of who I play. I enjoy playing people from all demographics – the variety adds spice to the game.
My main point, though, was that time controls don’t seem to have much effect on whether or not people play a given event. If anything, there seems to be a preference toward the quicker controls (G/60 or less). This could reflect a lack of patience in today’s attention-challenged generation (the cynical view), or it might just be that the events with short TCs tend to be one-day events, and those have other advantages, as detailed in my previous post.
I think Mr. Kosterman makes a really good point. An awful lot of the less experienced younger players (or their parents) are scared to play adults, in much the way the parents of a second grader think it is unfair for their child to play a high schooler, even if the second grader is rated 600 and the high schooler 200.
Similarly, I think a lot of adults see playing a child a no win situation. If you lose, you lost to a little kid, and if you win, you were supposed to win anyway. Not everyone has realized that there is no shame in losing to a nine-year-old girl.
Alex Relyea
I like to view playing a kid as a no-lose situation. Either I win, or I make the kid really happy (unless it’s one of those kids who’s twice my strength and knows from the start that he/she is going to win), and either of those makes me happy. There’s nothing like seeing a kid skipping away from the table with delight after beating me (I am not being sarcastic here – it really does tickle me).
As for losing to a nine-year-old girl, I did that in our 2016 North Central Open (I don’t know what her age was, but she could barely reach the board, and her wallchart rating was 3 digits). A year later in the same tournament, she tied for first with an expert. No shame at all in losing to her!
Just because I said I was leaning towards using the option which you don’t like as much doesn’t mean I didn’t read the replies.
If you can’t describe the point of the two segment time control (which has been articulated by at least three people in the thread—hint, what’s the point of all time controls), then you haven’t actually read them.