By “niche market,” I meant that these little tournaments, while perfectly respectable, do not outweigh all the other tournaments with “real” time controls. I also don’t have a lot of sympathy with the G/25-30 business. TDs like Steve have been exploiting a loophole in the rules, and now are squealing about having it closed on them.
So would these 25 minute games with analog clocks be regular rated?
I don’t think that’s such a good outcome.
Call it what you may, but the fact remains that many players have jumped gladly into the loophole that the existing rule has allowed organizers to take advantage of. The entire tournament landscape would change drastically for these players, unless G/25 d/5 continues to be permitted as a regular-ratable time control.
Bill Smythe
Under my proposal, yes – as long as the announced control for the tournament is G/25 d/5, and as long as a clock set for the delay is regarded as preferable to one that is not – i.e. either player who furnishes a delay clock has the right to insist that the delay be set.
Bill Smythe
Only if you really, really want four games in one night. Make it three instead, or start earlier. I don’t begrudge the organizers using the loophole, but their righteous indignation at losing it rings hollow.
My feeling is that the ultimate result is likely to be that G/25+5 seconds is what a delay-capable clock will need to be set to and G/30 is what a clock that is not delay-capable will need to be set to.
Whether that still works with time-limited venues is a question others will need to answer.
I am inclined to say that G/25+5 is NOT a niche market, though I’m not sure if we have the data to support that yet. We do know that G/30 events are the single most popular time control.
BTW, one of the issues that came up during debate is that G/25+5 actually penalizes the delay-capable clock owner, because unless the game lasts at least 60 moves the total time for such a game will be less than 30 minutes per player. It’s rather odd to penalize a player for providing the PREFERRED equipment.
Unfortunately we can’t tell from MSA whether or not 5 minutes was deducted for the 5-second delay. I know that a number of scholastic tournaments here have the primary sections at five rounds of G/30 on an ASAP schedule. I don’t take the 5 minutes off, start the first round a 9 AM, and have often started the awards ceremony before 1 PM (the young kids don’t come close to using all of the hour for the game).
And if your tournaments are like ours, many of he K and 1 grade have begun naps before the trophy presentation
Which posts in this topic would be the most likely to be described as exhibiting righteous indignation?
In my experience the ability to use G/25 d5 does help out scholastic tournaments. One of the biggest complaints I get from parents on why they don’t bring their kids to the tournaments is the amount of time is a lot more than other activities. My opinion is that G/25 d5 should be grandfathered in. What’s the harm? I only see upside.
I remember when there was a big fight over whether Game 30 should be regular rated. The argument was to accomodate/promote scholastic chess and to make it easier for organizers with venue problems to still hold events. It was accepted, as long as there was no further erosion. Game 30 was the cut off line between regular rated and the new quick chess. So then we began the slippery slope when time delay was adopted. Organizers, in spite of established rules which were not in favor of any time deduction, started taking 5 minutes off the clock. Why? Because CCA did it. Then other organizers did it as a reflex so that they had more time to do pairings. In a pre-computer pairing era, this made some sense. But why should the players be punished with less time to think because the organizer/TD is bad at time planning?
Taking time off the clock at G120 or in multiple time control situations was silly but had minimal impact on a game. Take 5 minutes off from a Game 30 time control is a significant deduction. If you really want to do this to the players then you should have to change the rule over the requirement to write down the moves. After all, in many of the scholastic tournaments, the kids do not write their moves down. Many exceptions are made for elementary players or for those under a certain rating selected by the organizer. It is the writing of moves that takes time, especially for those of us with increasingly arthritic fingers.
Once you drop down to Game 25 + d5, how long will it take before other organizers want to make regular rated chess Game 20 + d5 because his players have to make the 11 pm bus/subway/dirigible home?
A large part of the reason for the fuss this time was to PREVENT time control creep so that G/20+5 is never dual rated.
Now, there are those who believe that G/30 (or even slower time controls) should only be quick rated (with or without delay), but that’s really a separate fight.
Sometimes it amazes me that organizers have not started running events at time controls like G/20+10. Under the current rules, that would be dual ratable.
You’re kidding, right? Game 20 + d10 is dual rateable? I have played all sorts of time controls over the years and won over 60 qucik chess events starting in the 1980’s, but it never seemed like serious enough chess to rate on the regular scale. Too many blunders. Too much clock bashing. Bitter enders trying to run opponents out of time rather than resign. The sloppy play created and reinforced bad habits of thinking. Around here in W.Pa. there are few true QC tournaments; most players get QC ratings from dual rated events. The QC ratings of many players is so different from their regular ratings that they don’t find the quick system credible.
I don’t favor Game 30 for kids either. Too many kids play badly at this time control and get stuck with low ratings. It makes many of the kids act like they have ADD. Kids who finally start to play longer games often wonder why they wasted their time on Game 30. They feel they were cheated of the experience of having time to think. Game 30 is only played well by pros who are playing the game the way gamblers play poker.
He’s not kidding. G/20 + d10 is Dual-ratable. For that matter, so is G/15 + d15. As long as the main clock time in minutes + the delay/increment time in seconds add up to at least 30 and the delay/increment is 15 seconds or less, then it’s Dual-ratable. (assuming the main clock time is no greater than 60 minutes)
See: uschess.org/docs/gov/reports … hanges.pdf
It’s amusing. G/5 + d16 would be rated as Regular but not Quick. (And you would only have to keep score for your first move…) A tournament advertised as G/29 + d15 would be rated as Quick but not Regular. Etc. From the practical POV, good luck finding a tournament at such time controls; still, someone will try it someday.
These time control regs with designated Regular/Quick/Dual cut-off points for delay/increment were adopted two years ago and took effect last year, as I recall. This was part of the Rules Committee’s reaction to increment finally starting to creep down to amateur-level events. (Though some see a more pro-active stance.)
There are quirks and oddities, such as those mentioned above, but the line must be drawn somewhere—if we must have Quick and Dual rating systems. It makes me chuckle and it draws blank stares from longtime chess friends who have been blessed not to be bit by the bug that makes a guy think of such things…but to be fair there is no good way to delineate two rating systems—one clearly more standard or “serious” than the other—for all time controls from G/5 to 40/2, for games played by beginners to GMs.
There is some discussion of this in previous threads; it’s likely in the Forum archives.
Tournament chess was a wonderful thing in 1985, per my rose-colored contact lenses. Seven-hour Q+P endgames, adjournments, waiting for your buddy to finish marathon games for hours after you blundered and lost so you could drive home, trying to track down TDs and organizers to get info on events in a world before cell phones and the Internet, and so on all fade from view.
At least time controls could be taken seriously then. We had time to think. (Guys who go back to the '60s and '70s recall the heated debate over 30/30; some said that was too fast to be rated.)
“Solutions” to restore sanity to chess time that will never happen include:
A. Abolition of Sudden Death for Regular-rated games
B. Re-set the boundary for fastest Regular-rated game to G/60, or at least something slower than G/30.
That’s not going to happen. Things that might happen in this age of the world include:
- Abolish the Dual rating system. It was an honest attempt to perform an impossible task: make Quick and Regular ratings “look and feel” the same for the vast majority of players.
This way some of the quirks and oddities of the Dual/Quick/Regular thresholds will disappear. Plus, most players who express an opinion do not like Dual-rating—in some cases to the point that they organize or play in G/61 events to avoid it. It’s about the players, or should be.
- Re-set the threshold for fastest Quick-ratable game to G/10. I still don’t understand how the ED had authority to declare new time limit thresholds for rated games by fiat a few years ago. Had he done this to the Regular rating system there would have been backlash if not uproar. The fact that did not happen when the Quick time limit changed shows how much folks care about QC ratings.
This would eliminate the absurdity of rating G/5 under the same system (Quick) as G/60, apart from the plausible argument that rating any game faster than G/10 under any system is absurd. It would also restore the function of setting limits on ratable time controls to the Delegates, as it should be.
Or maybe the answer is to only organize, direct and play in slow time control events and save fast chess of all kinds for casual night at the club and online games. Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.
Indeed. Do I get to keep running G/29 delay 3 tournaments and rating them quick-only?
If not, just point me to the longest-allowable-time-control-with-delay-that-can-be-quick-rated-only. Thanks in advance. 
It’s an odd situation, and one not easy to correct.
If you advertise the time control as G/29+3 (or even G/29+5), and that is what players with delay-capable clocks set their clocks to, it is quick-only.
But if you advertise the time control as G/30+5 AND allow players with delay-capable clocks to subtract five minutes, e.g., setting the clocks to G/25+5, it is dual ratable, even though it is a FASTER overall time control than setting the clocks to G/29+3.
The extreme cases would be these:
Quick event: G/29+15
Dual rated event: advertised as G/30+15 with clocks set to G/15+15
It will be interesting to see if the Rules and Scholastic Committees can come up with a way to avoid that and also avoid invalidating some fairly popular events.
Too many loopholes. If an event is listed as being Game 30, then you should have as a minimum 30 minutes on the clock. Any manipulation is deceptive. How much fun it is to walk into an event that advertises one thing, but then changes the rules for the convenience of the TD. I wonder if the NFL would drop the fourth quarter of its Monday night games because the games run too long?
In the early days of TV NFL broadcasts there was one game where the network cut away to its scheduled movie. Some people are still unable to forget that when watching “Heidi”.
Yes, but it was only the Jets playing. 
Supposedly, after all the furor over the ‘Heidi’ game, there was an ad in the NY Times which read as follows: