I can’t help but observe the momentum toward increment time controls, if only because the pro-increment faction is fanatically pro-increment, while nobody seems to be particularly zealous about delay, except in contrast to sudden-death controls with no delay or increment at all.
My question, as I contemplate whether to board this bandwagon, is this: It was generally accepted, before the most recent rules revamp, that an n-second delay was roughly equivalent to adding n minutes to the time control (e.g., G/60 and G/55 + 5d were equivalent). What’s the rule of thumb for increment? If I’ve been running G/45 + 5d tournaments, for instance, what would be the equivalent time control incorporating increment instead of delay?
I’m not entirely sure I understand the question, but FIDE time control regulations assume a game of 60 moves. So, for example, if any player is rated 2200 or higher, the time control must allow at least two hours per player for a 60-move game. A time control of G/90 inc/30 (30 second increment in effect from move one) satisfies this requirement.
In general, wouldn’t a time control with 5 second delay be roughly equivalent to the same control with 5 seconds increment per move? In your example of G/45 d/5, a 60 move game would give up to 50 minutes per player; G/45 inc/5 would give 50 minutes per player. (The difference is that if a player moves within the delay time, the time on the player’s clock does not increase. If the player moves within the increment time, the player’s time on the clock is greater than the time at the start of the player’s move.)
Or am I really confused about the question? I may be – perhaps you would like to use a longer increment time, such as inc/30? In that case, using the “60 move game” assumption, you should use a time control of G/20 inc/30 (which would then be regular rated only since the increment time is greater than 15 seconds). You could also use G/30 inc/20, or other combinations that add to 50.
I suppose so, but I’ve never seen a time control with 5-second increment. Fifteen-second and 30-second seem to be the norm. The 60-move assumption helps – of course, based on your math, when you say “60 moves,” what you mean is 60 plays, or 30 moves by each player. Which, as it happens, is also the unstated assumption behind equating one minute of game time with one second of move delay.
There’s also the question of regular vs. quick vs. dual rating. In sudden death, the overlap range between regular and quick rating is 30 to 60 minutes. With increment, there’s a simple cutoff at 15 seconds. This suggests that any increment-timed tournament that one intends to be dual-rated should have a 15-second increment.
So I suppose, then, that one could make a conversion table of sorts:
No, it is 60 moves for each player. He’s dealing with game time per person. (Just like the reasoning for subtracting a minute from the time control for each second of delay.)
I could see the benefit of increment accruing from move to move where as if you moved fast enough you wouldn’t get the full benefit of time delay. Also increment would be much more beneficial if people ran into time trouble. I’m assuming that’s why some people like it so much (though I have not met any of these people myself). I don’t mind either way, but I’d think you’d have to subtract proportionally more time for increment than delay to make it fair.
You don’t have to reduce any time under increment. What is silly is to have increments at under 30 seconds. When you do that then you cannot force players to have to write down their moves.
As I have stated before, the increment system is more favorable to young players. When the time on the clock gets to 15 minutes or less, the stress of play increases markedly. Older players with high blood pressure will notice that they feel light headed and have difficultly maintaining control over their calculations. A typical response from such a player is that he feels “fuzzy.” Enduring this stress for up to an hour with the roller coaster ride of having minutes to seconds to minutes to seconds to think is exhausting and may be dangerous. The minimum time I would play with increment is Game 90 +30i. I have played with shorter time controls with the additional increment. Some of the older players around me swore they would never do it again.
Any increment system that has less than 1 hour for the main time control, and certainly any increment under 30 seconds, should be rated under QC rules only. Under QC you do not have to write down your move.
You don’t have to reduce any time under increment. What is silly is to have increments at under 30 seconds. When you do that then you cannot force players to have to write down their moves.
As I have stated before, the increment system is more favorable to young players. When the time on the clock gets to 15 minutes or less, the stress of play increases markedly. Older players with high blood pressure will notice that they feel light headed and have difficultly maintaining control over their calculations. A typical response from such a player is that he feels “fuzzy.” Enduring this stress for up to an hour with the roller coaster ride of having minutes to seconds to minutes to seconds to think is exhausting and may be dangerous. The minimum time I would play with increment is Game 90 +30i. I have played with shorter time controls with the additional increment. Some of the older players around me swore they would never do it again.
Any increment system that has less than 1 hour for the main time control, and certainly any increment under 30 seconds, should be rated under QC rules only. Under QC you do not have to write down your move.
So it’s unreasonable to require players to write down their moves in a game with no increment?
Based on these comments, I would surmise that you consider a sudden-death G/45 or even a G/45 + 5d “silly,” in which case all I can say is, your preferences and priorities are not mine or those of the people I play with or run tournaments for, and consequently your comments are not helpful in answering my question.
Although . . . it is interesting to finally see an example of someone with strong feelings against increment.
I think this is referring to rule 15B, which was modified to require both players to continue recording moves even though one player may have less than five minutes remaining if there is an increment of 30 seconds or more:
I have played under all different time controls. Still do. If you want to run an increment tournament, than you have to realize that the rules for delay and increment are going to applied differently. It is unreasonable to expect people to have to keep score when you have a short increment of 15 seconds.
What you want to do as a organizer/TD to set up a tournament is up to you. If you have severe time constraints for running the rounds of your tournament, then time delay offers the best chance of avoiding games bumping up against the next round. Time delay usually adds only a few minutes to a round in a Game 45 or Game 60 tournament. If you decide to use increment, you must leave more time between round starts. An increment game can have an indeterminate length. I have seen players mess with the system by making a bunch of meaningless moves just to lengthen the game; they wanted to get snacks and go to the bathroom. Annoying the TD was just a perk.
I, personally, will not play in an increment tournament under Game 90 + 30i, but if it becomes popular to have shorter times, fine. But recognize that the core of older players may vote with their dollars and avoid such events if the tournament is too stressful. I wish you success, but as an entrepreneur you have to make some compromises for your “customers”. If they don’t like your product they will go somewhere else to be entertained.
When delay started to come into fashion it was resisted by players who had analogue clocks and did not want to buy a new one; also by players who under the influence of Botvinnik style openings played to run people low on time. Once the prices came down, and you had a chance to see that sometimes time delay could save you or help you to win a game, then the resistance diminished. The same is true for increment. Once increment games are tried out for a while, they may be accepted. But it is a pain having to buy new clocks all the time.
Where I live, my “customers” want single-day tournaments. That’s what I’m giving them. G/90 + 30 inc would be dandy if a tournament could be decided in two rounds.
And your comments are still off-topic. The question is, “What is the standard formula for adjusting game time to account for increment time?” “Fifteen-second increment is unreasonably short, and I won’t play it” is not an answer to that question.
There appears to be no “standard formula” for adjusting a game to make delay and increment comparable. 30 seconds increment is the minimum used by FIDE. I have seen no one having anything less. The shortest time I have seen tried was Game 60 +30i. You can have any time you want as your base, but the 30i seems to be the minimal acceptable because of the rule for writing down your moves. The real question is should Game 20 + 30i or anything under 15 minutes base be regularly rated or quick rated? In Europe, some of the rapids the GMs play are Game 25 + 30i, but these are not rated on the regular rating list. The GMs prefer the rapid tournaments because they are not risking their rating points.
You can get lots of rounds in for a quck chess tournament, but how popular is quick chess? QC ratings seem to be as meaningless or meaningful as many online ratings. I rather like to practice in QC events, but there are few around.
There is no technical reason why increment should be 30 seconds, nor delay 5. But since increment is typically a bit slower than delay, organizers tend to use longer addbacks (such as 30 seconds) with increment, and shorter ones (5 seconds) with delay.
Increment may be ideal for slower time controls, but delay is definitely preferable for faster ones. A two-day 5-round event might be played at game/90 inc/30. By contrast, a one-day 4-round event would likely be played at game/60 d/5.
In an increment tournament, how should the main control be adjusted for games played using older, non-increment-capable clocks? The maximum allowable adjustment is 1 minute extra main time to compensate for each 1 second of increment. So game/90 inc/30 could become game/120.
In my opinion, this adjustment is much too great, and tends to reward players who furnish obsolete equipment. A better adjustment would be about half of the above, so that game/90 inc/30 would become game/105 without the increment. That should encourage players to bring proper equipment to the tournament.
What about a 5-second delay? In this case, IMHO there should be no adjustment at all. If the control is supposed to be game/60 d/5, let players who furnish older clocks simply play at game/60 with no delay.
Sounds reasonable to me. If neither player brings anything other than an analogue clock, they should get no special extra time.
When David Bronstein suggested the use of time delay, he proposed that the delay be 15 seconds not 5. You could take two or ten seconds to move. No time was saved up. He disagreed with the Fischer clock with increment. He said, " you should not get time for nothing." Bronstein won the first rapid tournament where the 15 second delay was tried.
Dude, how long does it take you to write down moves? There’s this thing? Called algebraic notation? Where a move can be written in three to five characters? And you don’t have to spell out “Pawn to King Four”?
Anyway . . . the current rules concerning rating and increment specify that any increment longer than 15 seconds is regular-rated, and any increment of 15 seconds or less is either dual-rated or quick-rated only, which imbues the 15-second increment value with greater significance. Like you, I haven’t actually seen a tournament with a 15-second increment. However, Seven Muradian (the most gung-ho of the increment backers, it seems to me) has scheduled a few single-day tournaments with a time control of G/45 + 10 inc. While I don’t think a 10-second increment is patently insane, I do wonder what, if any, meaningful advantage it has over delay . . . but that’s neither here nor there.
This is possible. The reason I asked the question in the first place is so that I can make a fair experimental comparison.
According to the revised rules, that’s exactly what one does now.
That’s not correct. If there are 16 or more seconds of increment or delay, then an event is regular-rated only, but if there are less than 16 seconds of increment or delay then we look at the total time per player. If that is under 30 minutes, the event is quick-rated only, if it is between 30 and 60 minutes, then it is dual-rated and if it is more than 60 minutes then it is regular-rated only.
You’re right, of course; it’s the boldface condition that I left out, since I wasn’t considering the counterintuitive combination of long game time with short increment time. I assumed, perhaps unsoundly, that the two would be kept in proportion. Nonetheless, I think my point about 15-second increment being imbued with significance by being made the cutoff still stands.
I can’t say that I see a lot of difference between something like G/90 increment 5 and G/90 delay 5. My guess is that both would add about the same amount of time to a game in a worst-case scenario, which from the point of view of the tournament planner is probably what he needs to know to decide things like the scheduled round times.
The critical question may be: How often does a player make a move in less than X seconds?
My guess is that for X=5, the answer is ‘almost never’, so both delay 5 and increment 5 will wind up adding the same amount of time to the game.
In fact, I suspect that all the way up to about X=15, the answer is still ‘almost never’, which may be part of the reason why the rules committee decided to use 15 seconds as the dividing point between ‘use the total time’ and ‘always regular-only’.
Anjiaoshi, “dude”, even algebraic notation takes time to write down. Especially if you are older and have a touch of arthritis in the fingers. That leaves you with 5 seconds or less to think and move the pieces. Makes it like delay but with the added challenge of having to write your moves down. Do you want us to have to juggle three balls, too, to add another physical step to the process? Even for many junior players the act of having to think, move, and write leads to sloppy scoresheets or none at all. The 30i is not sacrosanct but it was considered to be a reasonable accomodation with the rules requiring notation.
Ask Sevan Muradian if his 10i events require the players to write their moves down. They likely do not.
