I have recently begun running one-day, four-round events at
time control of Game/45 + 10-second increment.
The increment time actually does mitigate time scrambles,
and at our most recent event yesterday, I observed endgames
played to a conclusion that might not have been otherwise.
I think it works.
I do provide clocks at my events for those who either don’t
have increment or don’t know how to set it.
The Excalibur is very user-friendly in that regard, and players
used other clocks successfully.
I think increment shouldn’t just be for 90+30 FIDE bigshots.
It works well for shorter TCs at the local level as well.
Anyone else have experience doing this sort of thing?
I agree, and I also feel that “30-second-increment” and “5-second-delay” should stop being spoken as though they were single hyphenated words.
There is no inherent reason for increment to be long (30 seconds) nor for delay to be short (5 seconds).
There is nothing wrong with G/60 inc/5 for a one-day four-round event. And, especially, there is nothing wrong (and plenty right) with G/3 inc/2 for blitz.
A friend and I played some match games at G/60, Inc-15 and later at G/50, Inc-15. (Those were the slowest controls that could be Dual-rated at the time.)
I liked it, overall. The extra time per move helped me and helped my friend even more. I (now) agree with Bill Smythe that we should try different lengths of delay and increment. I used to support the position Alex Relyea has posted: that delay should be short and designed to prevent blitz farce and smash-clock, while increment is more designed to be part of the overall time control. Once I tried 10-second delay and 15-second increment in rated games, and 10-second increment in online games, I saw the light.
For serious chess I see why FIDE and the world settled on 30-second increment. I played it, once, in a club tournament where we tried it as an experiment. It works…I would not mind seeing USATE switch to the Olympiad time control someday.
The downside to 30-second increment for events with more than two games per day is the rare marathon ending, where either the next round is delayed or you have to think about adjournment. So for quads and Swisses with three or four rounds per day you need something shorter—but it need not be as short as 5 seconds, except perhaps a five-round G/25 d5 Swiss.
I have played rated games with delay of 3, 5 and 10 seconds and increment of 15 and 30 seconds. No reason increment can’t be 10 or 20 seconds. For delay, maybe 15 seconds should be the limit, if only since not all clocks support delay of 20 seconds or longer. (Plus a long delay on a Saitek could be confusing.)
Anyway, the control you mention can be a perfect fit. G/45, Inc-10 can be USCF Dual-rated and FIDE Rapid-rated—and you can use the adapted FIDE rules for competitions where there are more than six times as many players as arbiters, which solves much of the rules sets-disconnect.
If I had the proper credentials I might try to organize a few tournaments like that, to see how it went.
Mr. Mark is referring to the provision in the FIDE Laws of Chess for Rapid Play (analogous to USCF quick rated). Prior to July, 2014, the FIDE rules defined adequate supervision for rapid play as a game-to-arbiter ratio no greater than three to one. If there is adequate supervision, the “standard” competition rules apply. Otherwise, there are modifications that mostly bring the FIDE rule very close to the USCF rules. However, the current Laws of Chess specify:
In practice, this means that almost all rapid play will be covered by the alternate rules, even if the game-to-arbiter ratio is less than three to one. (It seems unlikely there would be an arbiter or assistant available to record every single game or that there would be DGT boards available for every game.)
For the monthly “Quad 45” tournament I run at the Portland Chess Club, we will be expanding the delay from 5 to 10, making the time control G;45/d10 over the current G/45:d5 to help mitigate time pressure.
The only problem that I see for using a 10 second increment is that you cannot apply the rules for writing down your move every move which you have with the 30 second increment. 10 seconds is not a lot of time to do more than chicken scratch scribbling. I would not want to inflict that on the players.
Game 45, 10i looks good for a four round event if you have only 8 to 10 hours to use a venue. This is a time control we might experiment with in the future. We have used Game 45, d5 only because we have to be out of the building by 5:30 pm because of evening activities. Otherwise, we would likely be using Game 60 or Game 75 for our one day events.
Sevan runs the occasional 4 round G/60; i30. That does make it a pretty long day, but fun. I don’t think you can do anything longer than that and still have 4 rounds. Most of the smaller 4 round events around here are G/40;d5 or G/45;d0, which is on the short side, but only lasts around 6 hours.
Exactly. We start the first round at 9:00 or 9:30. Any earlier and we inconvenience some of our traveling players. We get to the awarding of prizes about 6:00-6:30, and people can get home at a decent hour. This sort of thing is pretty much the backbone of the calendar in Alabama.
We used 10 second delay for “Quad 45” tournament yesterday and besides some confusion on how to set some clocks for 10 second delay, it was positive. The time scrambles weren’t as messy.