The term “Bronstein” is mentioned several times in the US Chess rulebook but it never explains how Bronstein works. I know a lot of TD’s and players who are unfamiliar with the Bronstein form of delay. The rulebook could also explain the other form of delay (and introduce Bill Smythe’s excellent term for it, “discrete” delay) and increment a little better. Perhaps adding the following TD Tip after rule 5B1c would be good:
“TD Tip: There are two different forms of delay, “discrete” delay (commonly known as “simple” delay and “US” delay) and Bronstein delay. Both are mathematically equivalent, equally acceptable for use under the rules, and just differ in how the delay is displayed on the screen. “Discrete” delay, the more commonly used method, shows the delay time separately from the main time on the screen, often by showing the delay countdown in digits or having something like the colons or the word “delay” flash each second during the delay time. Bronstein delay adds the delay time to the main time on the screen. If a player uses the entire delay time or more for a move, the clock will add the delay time to the main time. If a player uses less than the delay time for a move, the clock will go back to the time it had at the beginning of the move. The fact that the main time will never go above what it was at the beginning of a move is what makes Bronstein delay different from increment. With increment, (also commonly known as Fischer and bonus), the increment time is added to the main time each turn, regardless of the amount of time it took the player to move.”
I wouldn’t say no one is confused about this, but those who are either wouldn’t have the patience to read the proposed TD tip, or wouldn’t understand it, and thus would remain confused.
I myself have been confused a few times (as a TD) while observing games that had a DGT 2010 clock, which displays the delay in European (or “Bronstein”) fashion. I initially thought that they didn’t have delay turned on at all, and only figured out what was going on after several moves.
Yes, Bronstein is just weird and I suspect was invented because LCD’s used to be expensive, and you could implement it without any additional capabilities on the display. My point was that the proposal lists three different words to describe the more natural countdown delay (hey—how about a word that actually defines what it’s doing?) that really only make sense as contrasts to some alternative. (“simple” as opposed to “complex”??; “discrete” as opposed to something (usually the alternative is continuous, but that doesn’t apply here), “U.S.” as opposed to, I guess, European. No one needs to know that Bronstein exists or how it works to make sense of how countdown delay works.
I doubt that is why David Bronstein invented this form of delay.
This isn’t the point at all. The main point is to simply explain how Bronstein works. Another point is to explain how the other form of delay and increment work better than the rulebook currently does.
As a side note, the new versions of the Tap N Set clock (the “Official” US Chess clock) and other ZMart clocks are creating more confusion as to what “Bronstein” is, chess.com/forum/view/chess- … -incorrect.
This sounds like revisionist history to me. Bronstein and Fischer independently came up with the concepts of delay (Bronstein) and increment (Fischer) long before there were digital clocks. I suspect that Bronstein didn’t have any strong feelings about how the delay was to be displayed, as that wasn’t the main point of his idea. It only became an issue after we had digital clocks that were capable of displaying it one way or the other.
Some clock manufacturers now use “Bronstein” (incorrectly, IMO) to refer to a specific method of displaying the delay, but I’m pretty sure that it originally just meant delay (however it was displayed) as opposed to increment.
Correct. The natural way to implement delay is some type of separate timing loop (i.e. a countdown delay) which would have been relatively easy to implement for electrical-analog clocks. (It’s basically the same technology as the snooze button which has existed since at least the 1950’s). However, both delay and increment really needed digital displays to be useful, perhaps not so much for displaying the time, but for doing the settings. (A single delay or increment setting could be done with a single toggle, but how would you design a clock with an analog face that could handle 2/3/5/10/15/30 second delays? You could do a switch with a bunch of poles, but that would be much more likely to fail than a simple toggle.)
Let me propose a slight revision of your revision of revisionist history just a bit.
I doubt whether the arrivals of Fischer’s and Bronstein’s ideas occurred “independently” exactly. Most likely Fischer was first with his cumulative addback, and Bronstein, upon seeing Fischer’s idea, objected because it meant that a player with a clearly winning position, but in time trouble, could gain two increments on his clock just by forcing a double (careful, not triple!) occurrence of position. Thus Bronstein proposed non-cumulative addback instead.
Meanwhile, somebody in the USA was proposing the concept of delay. Perhaps nobody recognized right away that the Bronstein concept and the USA concept were mathematically equivalent. I’m not even sure which came first.
As to terminology, it’s even more complicated (and confusing) than you suggest. To be sure, FIDE uses the terms “Fischer” and “Bronstein” to distinguish cumulative from non-cumulative addback. FIDE also uses the term “increment” to refer to either cumulative or non-cumulative addback. FIDE has also used the phrase “accumulative or delay” as a synonym for its version of “increment”.
I dislike the idea of naming a timing system after an individual. A timing system should be named descriptively, thus “cumulative addback” and “non-cumulative addback”.
I also dislike the idea of describing the USA style method of displaying delay in any way that casts aspersions on the “other” display method. Adjectives like “simple”, “straight”, “normal”, “regular” are a bit offensive because they imply that the other way is somehow “complicated”, “crooked”, “abnormal”, or “irregular”, respectively. That’s why I like to use “discrete” and “combined” for the two display methods.
I agree with the “simple” (where the alternative somehow has to be “complex”). However, the same is true with “discrete” (not to be confused with its more commonly used homophone “discreet”, which probably would better be applied to the alternative, since it’s not as obvious), which really only kind-of describes it in contrast to what you call “combined”. (One could just as easily refer to the display of a separate delay countdown on the same screen as “combined”; they are, after all, combined onto one screen).
I refer to the use of a separate timer as “countdown” delay. I don’t think anyone has been confused for more than brief moment by how that works, even if the display isn’t as straightforward as the separately readable countdown timer.
The word “countdown” has occurred to me, too, to mean separate or discrete, as opposed to combined.
But I fear this might generate yet another term which will come to have more than one meaning. “Countdown” could mean discrete as opposed to combined, but it could also mean that actual countdown digits are involved, i.e. a display of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 at 1-second intervals, as opposed to a flashing colon or the word “delay” flashing.
The devil in me appreciates your (I hope humorously suggested) idea of “discrete” vs “discreet” to mean separate vs combined, respectively. But too many people don’t spell well, and/or don’t know the difference to begin with. Sooner or later we might also end up with “indiscreet” vs “indiscrete”, where (perhaps) “indiscreet” and “discrete” would be synonyms, as would the opposite pair “indiscrete” and “discreet”.
Countdown vs time-added seem to be reasonable alternatives that are at least somewhat descriptive of what is going on. However, no matter how this is described, if someone is determined to be confused, we can’t stop them.
Introducing the term “discrete” delay isn’t the main point of the TD Tip and I agree that adding this new term could be confusing so we can eliminate that.
“TD Tip: There are two different forms of delay, “simple” delay (also commonly referred to in countries outside the United States as “US” delay since this form of delay originated and is mainly used in the US) and Bronstein delay, named after Grandmaster David Bronstein who invited this form of delay. Both are mathematically equivalent, equally acceptable for use under the rules, and just differ in how the delay is displayed on the screen. “Simple” delay, the more commonly used method in the US, shows the delay time separately from the main time on the screen, often by showing the delay countdown in digits or having something like the colons or the word “delay” flash each second during the delay time. Bronstein delay adds the delay time to the main time on the screen. If a player uses the entire delay time or more for a move, the clock will add the delay time to the main time. If a player uses less than the delay time for a move, the clock will go back to the time it had at the beginning of the move. The advantage of simple delay is that the player can always tell whether the delay time or the main time is counting down and the advantage of Bronstein delay is that the player can easily see how much total time they have remaining without mentally adding the delay to the base time. The fact that the main time will never go above what it was at the beginning of a move with Bronstein delay is what makes it different from increment. With increment, (also commonly known as Fischer, after World Champion Bobby Fischer who patented this timing method, and bonus), the increment time is added to the main time each turn, regardless of the amount of time it took the player to move.”
With increment, the increment time is added to each move. With Bronstein delay, the delay time or time actually used on the previous move, whichever is less, is added to each move.
Bronstein delay is mathematically equivalent to the “discrete” delay usually used in the USA, as is demonstrated somewhere in the old thread Pave the Way for Increment.
It seems FIDE is moving closer to the USA terminology. Formerly, FIDE used Bronstein to mean non-cumulative addback (what we call “delay”), and Fischer to mean cumulative addback (what we call “increment”). And they used “increment” to mean either cumulative or non-cumulative addback.
I wonder if these FIDE terminology changes will increase or decrease confusion among players and organizers.
Nolan did not say he failed to understand Bronstein. What he asked was how the FIDE description, in and of itself, explained the difference between delay and increment. The phrase “If the clock is pressed before all of the bonus time has been used, the remaining bonus time is lost” almost needs to already be understood before it can be understood.
I agree that the wording in the FIDE arbiters manual could be improved. This is why for the TD Tip in the US Chess rulebook, we should go with the wording I proposed earlier in this thread, which I restate below with a few minor tweaks.
“TD Tip: There are two different forms of delay, “simple” delay (also commonly referred to in countries outside the United States as “US” delay since this form of delay originated and is mainly used in the US) and Bronstein delay, named after GM David Bronstein who invited this form of delay. Both are mathematically equivalent, equally acceptable for use under the rules, and just differ in how the delay is displayed on the screen. “Simple” delay, the more commonly used method in the US, shows the delay time separately from the main time, often by showing the delay countdown in digits or having something like the colons or the word “delay” flash each second during the delay time. Bronstein delay adds the delay time to the main time on the screen. If a player uses the entire delay time or more for a move, the clock will add the delay time to the main time. If a player uses less than the delay time for a move, the clock will go back to the time it had at the beginning of the move. The advantage of simple delay is that the player can always tell whether the delay time or the main time is counting down and the advantage of Bronstein delay is that the player can easily see how much total time they have remaining without having to mentally add the delay to the base time. The fact that the main time will never go above what it was at the beginning of a move with Bronstein delay is what makes it different from increment. With increment, (also commonly known as Fischer, after World Champion Bobby Fischer who patented this timing method, and bonus), the increment time is added to the main time each turn, regardless of the amount of time it took the player to move.”
appreciates your (I hope humorously suggested) idea of “discrete” vs “discreet” to mean separate vs combined, respectively. But too many people don’t spell well, and/or don’t know the difference to begin with. Sooner or later we might also end up with “indiscreet” vs “indiscrete”, where (perhaps) “indiscreet” and “discrete” would be synonyms, as would the opposite pair “indiscrete” and “discreet”. 