I’m curious what others think about this time control:
35/90 d5 SD/1 d0
To stay within the Acceptable Usage Guidelines I will not say what I think about it.
The reason delay was created in the first place was to allow people to play in a sudden death time control when the wouldn’t know how many moves longer it would go, thus making it more than a little difficult to budget your time.
Having delay in the first time control and removing it in the SD time control is … shall we say … inadvisable.
Do you mean SD/60?
Alex Relyea
Yes, Alex. I c/p from the ad. The TD/organizer surely meant an hour for sudden death. Good catch 
Rather than drive 2.5 hours north for this one this year, we’ll miss seeing the usual attendees and drive 6 hours south to play that weekend. It wasn’t just the TC that put me off, but I vowed not to go back this year.
Don’t be so sure. 
The intent may have been to force all the games to finish quickly after 90 minutes.
In any case, having delay for the first control and not for the second is a really, really, really, really, REALLY dumb idea. At the very least, it’s backwards. Plus, having different delay times for the two controls, even if it were the other way around, is fraught with problems, as has been pointed out many times in these forums.
Bill Smythe
Actually, after three hours (there being two players in the game 
) Well, I suppose this time control would guarantee that games last no more than three hours and seven minutes, assuming no time penalties are assessed.
Yes, what Mr. Smythe wrote. And that entire paragraph should have been in bold, italicized, and underlined type (and probably flashing red as well).
I will skirt the line drawn by the AUG and state that the organizer who set this time control would be well advised to make an appointment with his proctologist at the earliest possible time to have his head extracted.
I really wish organizers would stop listing time controls in this way (i.e. SD/1). It’s now against the standard and for good reason. It causes confusion. About 3 years ago when my son and I were first starting out, he played in his first dual time control game. It was listed something like:
40/110 SD/1, d5.
Being new to time controls like this I had no idea what this represented. I was pretty sure they didn’t mean SD 1 minute and it actually referred to SD/60. But, since it was written this way I couldn’t tell if it was 40 moves in 1 hr 10 minutes or 40 moves in 110 minutes. In addition it wasn’t clear whether there was a delay in the first time control or not. I had to email the organizer to find out.
I’m experienced enough now that I can correctly interpret this as 40 moves in 110 minutes and sudden death in 60 minutes with a delay of 5 seconds starting from move 1. But, there’s no reason to have such ambiguity in tournament publicity.
Not sure why you would make that assumption. It seems strange to think that the organizer decided to follow one standard and not another.
Alex Relyea