I have never played in nor directed a blitz tournament. Some club members have expressed an interest in holding one. So I download the rule sheet and read:
Standard timer for Blitz chess:
2a) Whatever timer is used (analog or digital), a standard timer must continue to run for both
sides even if one side’s time has expired. (See 8c).
Unless I’m misunderstanding 2A, none of the clocks I have come across do this. When the time is up, it’s 00.00
Is it a setting I don’t know about, or are special clocks needed?
Is this a “preferred equipment” standard, or a deal breaker?
No, this is the same issue we discussed in the other recent thread you started. It simply means that a clock may not freeze-at-end, aka halt-at-end…IOW, if White flags, his clock reads 0:00, but Black’s clock must keep running/ticking down. This is the principle “only players may call flags” at work.
Also, as noted in the other thread, for Blitz games with a 2-second increment, (not delay, just increment), the DGT NA and probably all DGT clocks are at minimum less preferred, since they cannot be set to not halt-at-end in increment mode.
I will leave out my personal head-scratching attitude toward the idea of rated Blitz. If you and the players at your club like it, have fun. Just make sure to disable “Claim” on an Excalibur Game Time II, or halt-at-end/freeze-at-end on other clocks.
I read it wrong, not sure what our clocks do off the top of my head, but that at least makes some kind of sense.
And Just for the record, there is no “If you and the players”, I personaly have no desire to play that fast. BUT, I am told with some regularity that the game 30/ delay 30 tournaments we hold are SO SLOW. What would these folks had done with 40/2?
This rule is poorly worded. I don’t see any way a digital clock could continue running for the player whose time has expired, unless it displays a minus sign and then counts backwards or something.
Undoubtedly the intention was that the clock should continue to run for one player even after the other player’s time has expired.
This might be a hold-over from multiple time control settings where you want a flag in the non-final time control to continue marking time so that it could be taken into account when the number of moves reached the next time control.
Yes, there’s been a lot of that hold-over stuff in rules written by the rules committee within the last year or so – especially in blitz.
If the committee would think things out, instead of grabbing a rule from somewhere else and trying to make one size fit all, maybe there would be fewer of these contradictions and ambiguities.
This all probably came from back in the days when the Saitek (where the clock stopped running when one player’s time expired) was the preferred clock for chess tournaments. This feature could not be deactivated for blitz on these clocks. What that meant is that you would have had to use another type of clock for blitz chess, unless you wanted your blitz games to have an impartial arbiter.