Improving US Chess rules 5A and 5B

US Chess Rules 5A and 5B explain how multiple time controls are suppose to be written but don’t explain how single time controls are suppose to be written. Also, the information about increment and delay is given within rule 5B which is titled “Sudden death time controls” but time controls without sudden death can have increment or delay as well. Therefore, I propose a re-write of rules 5A and 5B. To get us started, how about something like this (which also adds rule 5D to rule 5A as I proposed in a different thread):

A few additions and changes. Thoughts?

I would suggest formatters. Add some bullet points or enumeration. There are too many words. There are also some missed hyphens (full-time, ten-second.)

Example:

5B. Time control abbreviations.
i.Single time controls, the base time part of the time control is abbreviated G/mm (game, slash, base time in minutes).
ii. Multiple time controls, each phase where a certain number of moves must be made in an allotted period of base time are abbreviated #/mm (number of moves, slash, base time in minutes).

etc.

Going to substance - I think we can agree on d5 and i30 or +30 without a slash. For the move/time potentially everything is a number so a slash is necessary to serve as a formatter, but for the increment or delay the “i” or “+” or “d” serves that function by itself so that the "/"is unnecessary. G/90,d5 is clear.

Looks excellent to me. It separates the descriptions from the abbreviations, and so is much cleaner than before.

One quibble:

I think of a comma as being a stronger separator than a space, and a semicolon as being a stronger separator still. 40/120, SD/30 d/10 may appear to some to mean that d/10 applies only to the second control. I would prefer any of the following:

40/120 SD/30, d/10
40/120 SD/30; d/10
40/120, SD/30; d/10

– so that d/10 is more strongly separated from SD/30 than SD/30 is from 40/120. This should make it more clear that d/10 applies to both controls.

Well, one more quibble, perhaps. In 5B1, add the phrase I have bolded below:

(Don’t bold it in the actual version, though.) This should leave absolutely zero (-273 Celsius) wiggle room for the organizer to claim that there is no increment or delay just because none was mentioned.

Bill Smythe

Thanks for the feedback guys. The reason I listed the time control abbreviations the way I did is because that is how the rulebook usually lists them (although the rulebook generally doesn’t put a comma in-between the two time controls when listing a multiple time control but I accidentally did) but it would probably be good to change this. I usually write multiple time controls in this format, 40/120,SD/30;d10 or G/90;inc30, and that’s what I’ve done below. I agree that a semi colon is a stronger separator than a comma which is why I write multiple time controls the way I do. I don’t think spaces or a slash for the increment or delay are necessary.

How about this:

That’s true, but I still (slightly) prefer “inc/30” or “d/5” over “inc30” or “d5”, because I like parallel construction. The stuff after the / slash is minutes or seconds, the stuff before is whatever else it needs to be.

Of course, since many (most?) organizers write “inc30” or “d5”, the Chess Life editor shouldn’t feel it necessary to add the slash if it isn’t already there. Everybody will understand it anyway. But in the statement of the rule, it would be (a little bit) better if the slash were to remain.

I do not like “i” as an abbreviation for increment. A lowercase “i” is so tiny that it can be overlooked, or confused with the digit “1”. So let’s at least stay with “inc”.

I don’t care for “+” either – even though this is the official FIDE abbreviation – because it could, intrinsically, stand for either increment (cumulative addback) or delay (non-cumulative addback). But “+” could continue to be mentioned, as an alternative to “inc”, in the statement of the rule, so that readers will understand FIDE announcements better.

Maybe we should get rid of the comma altogether, leaving only the semicolon (the strongest) and the space (the weakest) as the only “official” delimiters. Thus, for two controls, “40/90 SD/30; inc/30” or “40/120 SD/30; d/10”. For single controls, we don’t need a semicolon OR a comma: “G/90 inc/30” or “G/120 d/10”.

Bill Smythe

Whether time time controls are abbreviated with spaces, commas, colons, slashes, etc. in the rulebook isn’t that important.

Go ahead and keep the comma and semicolon.
Then you don’t have someone who flagged on move 28 desperately claiming 30/30 15/15 SD/15 d5 should be read the same as 30/301, 5/15, SD/15; d5.

I was at a weekend G/90 tournament once where someone claimed that round times of 12, 4, 8, 12 4 meant that he could leave on Saturday night and show up for the Sunday morning round. The other 100+ players understood that there was a Saturday 8 PM round and that Sunday morning was open and allowed people to go to church without missing a round.

Jeez, Micah, I was only trying to put a minor finishing touch on your already excellent prose.

For example, the following paragraph (yours) could be left exactly as is –

This version doesn’t mention the slash / one way or the other. But the slashes could still appear in the examples. My (minor punctuation) suggestions are bolded below. (I am also suggesting a colon instead of a hyphen between each example and its description.):

That way, you are gently nudging the reader into using the slash, but not requiring it.

You don’t need the commas for that. A single semicolon will suffice: 30/30 15/15 SD/15; d/5.

Or, if the original intention was that the delay was only for the final control: 30/30 d/0; 15/15 d/0; SD/15 d/5.

It took me a minute to figure that one out. Here, words are preferable to punctuation: “Saturday 12-4-8, Sunday 12-4”. That guy apparently thought it was “Saturday 12-4, Sunday 8-2-4”.

Bill Smythe

Or 25 or 6 to 4.

I don’t get it.

Bill Smythe

Does anybody really get it?

Part of lyrics to a rock song.

Does anybody really know what time it is? (Sorry, couldn’t resist)

I’ve moved this topic here from US Chess Issues.

My problem is that I’m older than rock.

When rock was up and coming in the late 1950s, polka artist Whoopee John recorded a polka-style waltz he called “Rock and Roll to the Round and Round Beat”. It seemed to both embrace and make fun of the new rock genre:

“We’ll dance off der fat, just like dee hep cat, as we rock und roll mit dee round und round beat.”

(In those days, you were a “hep cat” if you were into rock and roll in a big way.)

You can probably find this recording on YouTube if you search for “Whoopee John rock”.

Bill Smythe

“25 or 6 to 4” is a song written by Robert Lamm for the band “Chicago” (originally called the Chicago Transit Authority) I cannot remember who he wrote the song with or if he did it alone. There has been a lot of speculation about the meaning of the phrase, some thinking it refers to drugs. Lamm said in an interview it ended up being about writing a song in the middle of the night “before the break of day.” I believe the song came out around 1970 when I was a teenager. “Chicago” was big at that time. They performed on the college concert circuit for a while. Then rock music concerts went big to play in stadiums. Great band with a number of hits.

Sorry to be a spoilsport, but this is where the off-topic posts should end. Any more will be pulled.

I’m not a great fan of putting something so incredibly detailed in the rule book (as an actual numbered rule). At one point 40/2 was considered to be a perfectly clear and reasonable way to indicate what would now be written 40/120. Times change, time controls change, clocks get a wider variety of settings—why would we want to engrave in (virtual) stone what looks reasonable now? It’s one thing to have a standard to be used for TLA’s (which can evolve quickly if someone starts using a TC which isn’t especially clear with the current standard). The last thing we need is someone starting a thread saying that the EB changed the notation for delay from d/5 to d5 without delegate approval.

Yep, detailed wording in the rulebook on stuff like this seems to get dated fast. My concern about changing this kind of thing has to do with the reporting of a tournament. I seem to recall that some formats worked and others did not when reporting things like time control. If we as a body change that format in the rules will that require some programing changes? Just wondering.