Today I played in my first rated tournament this year. A few things I read on the Forums lately rolled through my addled mind between blunders. Theory vs. practice sort of stuff.
As noted in the Quad thread I bumped, the TD paired the four lowest-rated players (of 10) as a quad and the six highest-rated players as a Swiss. (The rating gap between players 6 and 7 was 701 points.) No one complained.
There was no TLA, but the online publicity mentioned simply “G/40.” When I asked the TD if there was a 5-second delay he looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course,” he said.
During one game, the players discovered that the delay was not enabled, on a DGT NA clock. The TD, who did not know how to enable the delay on that model of clock on the fly, added one minute to each side. (Or had the owner of the clock do so, as the TD watched. The clock-owner won the clock as a team prize at the USATE and did not seem versed in its nuances.)
Now that a year has passed, how has the higher k-factor for most players affected the rating system? I supported this change up till yesterday.
Lest anyone read the above as a knock on the TD here, I mean quite the opposite. We have been friends for 30 years, he is a competent “x’s and o’s” director as to pairings and OTB rules, and he has just started another game effort to reboot rated chess in our 'hood. He can even set more than one model of digital clock, though not the DGT NA.
OTOH, the procedural niceties and subtleties we debate on the forums, in re stuff listed above and similar…he does not bother with. For example: He became a Local TD ‘by accident,’ when he over-performed on the Club TD test. When he found out he had been promoted, he chuckled.
How much micro-detail can we ask folks like him—conscientious Club/Local TDs and organizers of small events—to keep up with, including the inevitable tweaks and changes most years? It’s an interesting question…
I believe the consensus on the Ratings Committee is that the higher K has been slightly inflationary and was one of the reasons why they raised the bonus threshold earlier this year.
Just a clarification:
The rulebook clearly states (in Rule 5F) that it is not the responsibility of the TD to know how to set clocks. It is entirely the responsibility of the clock owners. There is a secret trick which some players have discovered for learning how to do this: Read the owner’s manual!
+1. (Hope I got that usage right. I am brushing up on forum-speak in other fora.)
Also, this event might have had a short TLA, but neither the TD nor his hapless consultant (moi) could find useful information at first on how much that would cost, where it would run when, or a sample TLA form to fill out. That last one throws some people, for some reason. I put the TD in touch with Joan D., who helped much as always, but by then it was TLA deadline-time and he decided email, Web site and word-of-mouth was enough.
I felt bad about the clock with the delay not set situation. I wanted to help—I once had a DGT NA, which I studied in detail—but at the time I was in the final throes of snatching defeat from the jaws of plus-over-minus. This might be a fanciful idea, but maybe when clocks are awarded as prizes at large events such as the USATE, there could be a session on how to set the things.
As much as I love forum debates on rules and procedural nuance, I also wish things could be made simple (r) for players, TDs and organizers out in the wild, below the Big Show level. Best of both worlds. Someday…
Well you could always build a cheat sheet, post the contents here on the forums, get it teamed thru the help of the community and then send it to the ED for review and use
Or wait - the Chess Clubs Committee could do this - wouldn’t that be a novel idea - oh wait, I forget, in referencing the non-producing clubs committee with the AWOL chair…
The DGT NA is not too bad in doing settings or resets. It has a list of pre-sets on the bottom of the clock. I tend to use setting #1 (5 minute chess), #20 (one session, manual setting of the time control and delay), and #23 (multiple session, manual setting of the time control and delay) the most. I let the kids at our club goof around with one of the clocks for a while; they figured out all of the settings within 20 minutes. If anyone has a clock question we send them to one of the kids for an answer.
Until the new Rulebook comes out, the TD on the battle lines can still keep on track by downloading the rules updates from this website. He can google info on how to set chess clocks for delay and increment. IIRC, there is a set of these on the Maryland state affiliate website, as an example. The TD may still omit putting the full time control data on his TLAs, but as long as he uses the standards on site, has pairings done on time, pays his prizes out immediately after the tournament, and gets the event rated, no one is going to complain. It also helps if he is an affable sort who orders in pizza for the players and schmoozes with parents and players between rounds rather than hide in a TD room.
Or, if they know how to set the clock initially but not how to make a mid-game time adjustment, and they are awarded 2 extra minutes by a TD ruling, they forfeit the right to the 2 extra minutes if the TD doesn’t know how to do it either.
Or, if the clock was furnished by the opponent, and the player is awarded 2 extra minutes, and the opponent doesn’t know how (or refuses) to make the adjustment, the player should be given the right to substitute his own clock if he knows how to adjust it.
Absolutely correct. The rulebook specifies a standard delay of five seconds for regular rated games. The failure to specify a delay does implies the standard delay, not the absence of a delay. To rule otherwise renders the specification of a standard delay meaningless.
I tend to agree with this, but please see recent thread in which some speculated that a literal reading of the latest (current) rules means the delay or increment must be announced in all pre-event publicity, TLA or no.
In any case, 5-second delay has come to be so standard in Regular-rated G/XX events that it would take years for players to adjust to anything else—barring an explicit announcement of another delay or increment value. Without such a clear announcement, players will set their clocks with a five-second delay…if they know how to set them at all.
As Yogi Berra once said: In theory, theory and practice are the same. But in practice they are not.
Chronos clocks are perhaps the most common brand at tournaments.
Unfortunately, a Chronos clock cannot be set without the manual (or memorization of the manual); because setting a Chronos starts with needing the appropriate code (from among the dozens it offers).
The TO/TD can spare himself and several customers hassles by publishing the appropriate Chronos code Id as part of the time control specification.
TD’s are not obligated to know the Chronos code for the time control format that they frequently reuse in their tournaments, therefore TDs are wise to not provide the code Id in the TLA info.
The reasons why 5B2 was passed to require complete time control information include the fact that not all players were aware of the ‘standard’, nor were all organizers/TDs. This resulted in a lot of confusion as to what the proper (and complete) clock settings should be for an event because what was in the TLA was usually incomplete.
It was decided that the best way to remedy this was to mandate that TLAs and other advance publicity give the full time control, including the increment/delay setting to be used.
I never had any problem with players being unaware of the standard delay. My view of the motive for changing 5B2 is more cynical–it, combined with a new delimitation of rating system boundaries, permitted a certain vocal organizer’s G/25 d/5 events to continue to be regular rated.
EDIT: Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with G/25 d/5 events being dual rated, but the response, in my view, was overkill, and opened the door to such nonsense assertions like “Failure to state a delay means no delay.”
You are forgiven. But can’t the all-powerful Moderators simply erase phantom posts like this?
OK, I will take your word on the time deduction-for-delay rule and the drama it caused a few years ago. Sounds vaguely familiar. I think we are in a good place with the time control rules and thresholds in place now—if we must have Regular-rated G/30 and if we must have rated Blitz. As the former will never change and the latter won’t change any time soon, I think things are relatively well.
My (slight) concern is over comments from recent Forum threads, where I sensed potential for over-zealous enforcement of the “delay must be specified CLEARLY in ALL publicity, or things go tilt” standard. That’s a theory thing. In practice, things are relatively well. For now. Let’s not jinx it.
