True for regular folks like us, at regular USCF-rated tournaments. Too much potential for confusion otherwise. Still, if it works for the world championship match—and the entire WC cycle—and since some GMs seem to prefer increment starting only at move 61 in a three-part time control, there must be something to it.
I posted before about my chess friend who is firmly in the “delay should only apply to the ultimate SD stage of the time control” camp. That placed him alone among players at the club we both frequented a few years ago, at least among the few players who paid attention. I agreed to use delay only for the secondary stage when I played him, per his request and with the TD’s blessing. (Easy since he and I were 2 of 3 rotating TDs.) That did not impact the result of any of our games, but this was 1900-rated scrubs at a local club playing 40/90, SD/60. In other circumstances there could be issues.
It seemed strange to me that Ivanchuk’s results at the 2013 Candidates did not attract more attention. He lost about four games on time in the first two-thirds of the tournament, before making peace with the time control and beating the contenders Carlsen and Kramnik in the last few rounds. In that event, the increment took effect at move 61, after ‘pure’ controls of 40/120 and 20/60.
Ivanchuk left himself with seconds to make multiple moves before the first control more than once. This might have been instinct from relying on the increment in other top-tier events. Maybe; of course, there is the Chucky factor.
Would history have been changed if the increment started with move one in last year’s Candidates?
Not to make extra work for the office, but what about set standards for TLAs in Chess Life. There is a listing of abbreviations and their meanings available in Chess Life and to the Organizer/affiliate submitting the TLA. Why not require that any abbreviations in a TLA conform to the list of abbreviations in the Chess Life listing? Someone pointed out that the Chess Life list only has the +30 for increment, so why accept the inc abbreviation in a TLA? Rather reject the TLA and require it to be resubmitted with the Chess Life abbreviation(s) listed and available for use in a TLA.
Please note that this would only be for abbreviations, so that it is clear [due to the available list] what an abbreviation stands for when used. If something is not abbreviated [i.e. 30 second increment], then there should be no problem. The only problem would be for those who do not know what something [increment] is in the first place, and will need it explained.
Another advantage of d5 over d/5 is that a clock using 7-segment characters can display “d5”, so clock makers could make clocks that use the same delay notation on their settings interface that the TLA uses. This would make it less confusing to set the clock.
Maybe we should encourage an increment notation that also can be represented by 7-segment characters? Maybe “n30”? (“i30” would work on the clock, but might be hard to read in small print in the TLA).
I’ve never seen “+” used for delay. If more organizers start using “+” for increment, as described in the explanation of symbols in the TLA section of Chess Life, it might catch on as a standard which is more compact than “inc/”.
That was actually in my other ADM to amend rule 5B2, but yes, I got rid of the “40/120, SD/60 d5” example because I didn’t want to argue about where the commas should go. The Rulebook Changes document actually has several examples where there are no commas at all, in the TD Tip for rule 5C: “40/90 SD/30 inc/30” and “40/120 SD/60 d/5” (this last one would be changed to “40/120 SD/60 d5” if my ADM passes.) The original 5th edition of rule 5B gives as an example “40/2, SD/1” and this is changed to “40/120 SD/60” (without a comma) in the Rulebook Changes document. My feeling is that commas can be added for clarity but aren’t part of the standard. I suppose it could be argued that commas are disallowed by the standard.
My feeling is that there is no consensus yet about what format to use for increment, so there should be fairly wide latitude. I do think that “inc” should be added to the list of symbols in Chess Life, since it’s more commonly used than “+”.
It would probably be too complicated to do in practice, but it actually makes sense in multiple time control tournaments to have BOTH delay and increment at different stages. E.g., 40/120 d5, SD/60 inc/30.
This is because delay and increment serve different purposes. The purpose of a d5 is to give players time for the mechanics of making a move and punching the clock. It is not to give them more thinking time.
An inc/30, on the other hand, is there to give more thinking time. It also gives time for the mechanics, but that is a side effect rather than the primary mission.
There is a clock that would actually handle 40/120 d5, SD/60 inc/30, I believe. That’s the DGT XL in manual mode.
I’d like to see an upper limit on delay, in the 5-10 second range. Longer than that, and it is giving thinking time, and an increment should be used for that.
This post by Jeff Wiewel led to an off-topic discussion about move counters, so I split it off into a new topic, “Problems with move counters (clock-punch counters).”
The change from d/5 to d5 really would have been best as an editorial change in the 6th edition, similar to “press the clock” in the 5th edition vs. “punch the clock” in the 4th edition. Since it’s too late for that, maybe it should wait for the 7th edition. We can discuss that at the Rules Workshop. The reason d/5 is in the rulebook is that the delegates added a rule to require the time delay to be specified in tournament publicity.