ppwchess wrote:
Do your settings include a move counter these days?
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Ah heck, I’m not shy. When playing White, I offer and ask my opponent if he would agree to play with my usually nicer than anything else in the tournament, wooden set, wood board, and clock. I do have them all matched to look good together after all. I also have my Chronos set to show both the count down of the delay and all the time digits, including seconds, in the display.
The vast majority of times my opponents will agree to use my stuff. In fact they often thank me for being able to play on such a nice set, no kidding. And don’t get me wrong, I can lose on my nice stuff and clock just as easily as on anything else.
Ron,
Can you do this if the time control is greater than 99 minutes and 59 seconds? If so, what mode do you use?
Thanks.
It may be true that some organizers and TDs do not factor in enough time between rounds to make up for the ‘extra’ delay time. Consider, though, that a game must go 90 moves for it to add an extra 15 minutes, 120 moves to add 20 minutes, and so on. Once you hit that point, I think you are justified in asking for a few extra minutes to recover for the next round.
To me, that rare marathon game is much less disturbing than the blitz trash clock-smash finishes we saw in the first few years of rated SD controls, before delay-digital clocks came along. Also note that five seconds is not THAT much extra time; if one player is well behind on the clock, he will still be at a time disadvantage even with the delay enabled—as he should be. The point is that he will not lose on time in a clearly winning position, a few moves from mate.
You may well be right about the Budapest game. For years I tried to make the …Ra8-a6-g6/h6 Rook lift idea work in the main line with 4. Nf3. Not once did it happen in a rated game. It’s amazing how bad I stink at chess…maybe I will just post to the Forums from now on.
For Delay timing I use AN-1. This gives the time in hours and minutes when you initially set it up. As it runs, the delay is shown counting down with either the hour and minutes or minutes and seconds showing. When the delay runs out, the hours and minutes turns into showing hours, minutes and seconds. In all honesty, I don’t notice the delay count down normally because I am looking at the board, and if it my opponent’s move, I can wait the short delay time to see his seconds. When it is under one hour, the minutes and seconds are always displayed, even during the delay countdown.
For Blitz and Skittles I use AN-1A. It is set for a single digit minute timing with the delay countdown showing along with the minutes and seconds left.
For increment, I use CH - P1 as recommended by Ken Ballou for the slower time controls. Here is the link to his page:
Interesting—but you cannot see hours, minutes and seconds while the delay time is counting down…pretty sure that can’t be done on a Chronos since there is not enough space for the required digits. Probably true for any digital clock.
Thanks for the link. Ken Ballou or whoever thunk up using CH-P1 for increment is a genius. I wonder, though, what advantage this method holds over the simpler CH-P5. (Or CH-P6 for two time controls, with increment.)
The sunny side to P5 and P6 is the lack of a move counter, of course…
You’re welcome. I didn’t even remember writing that page originally. Digging back in my memory, I think it was just because I didn’t know that CH-P5 would do increment with one time control!
On the other hand, I do rather like that designation of “genius.” 
But any time you are under 1 hour (the most critical time), all digits of the time (mm:ss) are displayed, even when the delay is counting down, right?
The Chronos has a six-digit display, but in mode AN-1 one of those positions is used for the hyphen. So it cannot display h:mm:ss and the delay digit all at the same time.
Most other clocks have, at most, a 3-and-a-half digit display. That is, they can display 4 digits, but only if the leftmost digit is a 1. Thus, they cannot display everything until they are under 20 minutes (e.g. 19:59).
Bill Smythe
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It is true that you cannot see the hours, minutes and seconds while the delay is counting down (Of course you can see the delay countdown). But once the delay is over, the display changes so that you can see the hour, minutes and seconds in the display. Of course when your clock is running and you have gone past the delay, your seconds are counting down, which you can see. When you are below the one hour mark in time, the minutes, seconds and delay countdown are all visible in the display at the same time. As I said though, I find that I never notice my own delay countdown. It’s usually only 5 seconds and in that time I’m looking at the board or my opponent’s face for that certain look of shock at how I could hang pieces so easily.
Ken wrote instructions for setting up both P-1 and P-5 on that site. The reason he says the P-1 might be preferred is that when time runs out there are 3 horizontal bars in the display in the P-1 and not in the P-5 mode.
The Excalibur has a spot for large HH:MM or MM:SS, a small place for SS while HH:MM is showing up in the large spot, and an entirely seperate area for the delay time.
The Boylston Chess Club in Boston still has one yearly tournament (the Paramount) with adjournments.
I only had one (out of ten rounds) when I last played in the tournament. My strategy during the adjournment was mostly just to play the adjourned position against a computer over and over. (It was sort of a waste; I learned a lot of the subtleties of the position, but my opponent went off the rails pretty early and I was given a practically winning position within a few moves.)
Actually I haven’t played any 2 control tournaments in a few months so I don’t recall. I think I still have both a setting with and without a move counter on it. I just haven’t used either one in a while.
I thought there was a space for the move count, too. Maybe that’s the SS you’re talking about. Maybe that space is used for either move count or SS, depending whether the move count is set to display or not.
Bill Smythe
SS is seconds. So you have a BIG hours and minutes and small seconds. The move counter (if turned on) is in yet another spot.
Once you are used to it you can see the time in minutes (technically it is not hours and minutes but rather number of minutes that goes in excess of 100), seconds, delay and move counter all at the same time.
For games with a delay of 9 seconds or less and a single time control of G/99 or less, (G/90, delay-5 in the real world) you can use CH-A1.
That shows the delay time tick down—when the delay elapses it stays visible at 0. Also, you can see the precise amount of time left to each player, to the second, at all times. That’s the advantage to using minutes (90) rather than hour+minutes (1:30).
CH-A1 is perfect for controls that meet the listed parameters. Unfortunately, there is no way to get around the 99:59 limit for any given control; thus, it cannot handle standard controls for serious events, such as the USATE, which use 40/2. (Or 40/120 or 40/115 or G/120)
Thus my question earlier in this thread…I think.
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I used to use CH-A1 as my main preset time control for all non-blitz tournament games. It works fine. We have an annual tournament in Peoria that has a G/120 time control, so I would need to use something different for that.
You’re right that having the minutes instead of the hours is better for G/75, G/80 and G/90.
I only use the first 3 or 4 presets. The “1” spot is AN-1A for blitz and the single digit, minute time controls. I now have CH-P5 on there as well because I’m wishing that we might start using increment instead of delay. I think I’ll go ahead and save CH-A1 in place of the increment speed slot.
Thanks Eric, you’ve reminded me about CH-A1 and how nice it is to have minutes showing instead of the hour and minute breakdown.