A friend of mine is playing in the Tim Just Winter Open this weekend, and asked me about the following announcement concerning rules:
An increment time control of 30 seconds or more is not considered sudden death, therefore 14G (both flags down) does not apply.
We are both puzzled as to how this would be applied. In sudden death, the game would be declared a draw. If it’s not a draw in an increment time control, what is it? You can’t just continue on to the next time control, because there isn’t one. All the time is gone for both players, and there is no way to prove which flag fell first. How can this be anything other than a draw (assuming no checkmate on the board)? If 14G doesn’t apply, what is the ruling? How do you proceed? I don’t have my rulebook handy, but I don’t recall this situation being addressed.
That’s somewhat non-intuitive, but it does make sense. For years, I didn’t think my Chronos clock could do increment time controls at all (I actually bought another clock because of this). Then I found that I could simulate increment by setting it for an endlessly repeating 1-move time control: 1 move in 90 minutes/1 move in 30 seconds/1 move in 30 seconds/… Looked at that way, it’s not a single time control, so you can always go to the next one. That works for me. Thanks.
The language of the announcement is that in the TD TIP following rule 14G. As the editor of the rulebook has emphasized many times, “TD TIPs are not rules.” Personally, I can find nothing in the text of the rules proper (excluding TD TIPs) that justifies the statement that a time control segment in which all the (remaining) moves of the game must be completed is not a sudden death time control if the segment includes an increment of at least thirty seconds.
I would be very happy for anyone to show me what I have overlooked.
While this is true, a time control segment in which all the (remaining) moves of the game must be made that includes an increment of fifteen seconds could be interpreted as a progressive time control of which the final segment is 1/0.25. Indeed, any such “final” time control segment with an increment can be interpreted as a progressive time control whose final segment is 1/some fraction of a second.
Why would an increment of at least thirty seconds cause such a time control segment not to be considered sudden death, while a lesser increment would not disqualify the segment as sudden death?
And on that very old model (like mine), you can use CH-P3, as long as there is only one (main) time control.
I was aware of that also, but I would strongly advise against it. In that mode the clock will “unflag”. If a player exceeds the time limit, he will still get 30 seconds added after he presses his clock.
I also noticed, though, that that mode could be used to simulate having both increment and delay. If you set the above mode to also have a 5-second delay, in effect you have a 30-second increment and a 5-second delay. Has anybody ever run such a tournament? (There’s still the unflagging problem, though.)
That TD Tip is the second-stupidest thing the rules committee has ever written. And it was written, apparently, without the input of either Tim Just or Ken Ballou. This point has been discussed in other threads. There is absolutely no justification for considering a 30-second increment to be not sudden death. The rules committee wanted to declare that scorekeeping is required, even when under 5 minutes in sudden death, if there is an increment of 30 seconds or more. Instead of simply stating that declaration explicitly, they dreamed up this ridiculous path through Robin Hood’s barn.
Incidentally, for anybody worried about how to set their Chronos clocks for the Tim Just Winter Open, it’s all moot anyway. Clocks will be furnished by Sevan Muradian, and they will all be set in advance – DGT North American.
(Only in the separate scholastic event will the players need to furnish clocks, and that event uses delay rather than increment.)
I’m not sure which version of the Chronos I have, but I have had it for quite a few years. The copyright on the instruction book is 1995. The on-off switch is a red square on top, and the other buttons are mechanical (not the “sensory” type). As far as I can see, the only way to get it to do a single time control (such as G/90 or G/2) with increment is CH-P5 (which is basically what I described in my earlier post), and that’s what I use. I have never checked to see whether it would “unflag”, but if it does, I see no way around that other than using a different clock.
I’m not playing in the Tim Just event (I am directing a rival tournament in Neenah, WI – we wish that the Tim Just event had chosen a different weekend!), so this is not an immediate worry for me. I was just asking on behalf of my friend.
As one of the TDs at the Winter Open, I consider the single 90+30 time control to be sudden death. Both flags down is a draw. I don’t see how you could reasonably conclude it any other way.
Actually there isn’t a delay. The time control is G/25;d0. Players do need to bring their clocks, though.
I’ve heard that this date was chosen because it what was available at the hotel. In the past this tournament has been the first weekend of the year. Maybe because the Saturday was so close to the first had something to do with it. I don’t know. Tim Just would have to chime in here for the definitive reason.
With DGT North American clocks being provided, this situation will not arise. The DGT North American “freezes” when one player runs out of time (only in increment modes).
The announcement in question appears when you click on “Increment Rules” from the Tim Just website:
Obviously, this sentence needs an update, as does the passage in the rulebook from which it is quoted.
If 14G does not apply, then what does? It would have to be 16T:
But how can the game continue if both players are out of time? 16T continues as follows:
– which is essentially the same as 14G.
On top of all this, either way, the entire situation is moot anyway, because in increment mode on the DGT clocks (the ones that will be furnished by the organizer), as soon as either player runs out of time in a single-control event, both clocks stop, so that it is never possible for both players to run out of time.
And maybe that’s the best way out of this mess, anyway.
Another head-scratching sentence on that “Increment Rules” page reads as follows:
In this case, at least one TD (or organizer) will know how to set the clocks, because he/she/they will already have set them before the tournament begins. And, in fact, here it is the players who cannot be expected to know how to set the clocks. For my own part, I have no idea how to set a DGT clock, although I do know how to reset it for the next game using the same control.
Thanks for pointing that out. It does need an update. Fortunately even if DGT clocks continued instead of halting, the likelihood of this situation occurring in a 90+30 is akin to a snowball’s chance…
It’s only recently that clocks have been provided by Sevan. Clearly this point is from prior tournaments where players furnished their own strange variety of clocks.
DGT NA clocks are actually one of the easier clocks to set. I’ve never once looked at the manual for one and I was able to easily figure how to configure one. A chronos, on the other hand, I don’t even know how to turn the damn thing off.
Most Chronos owners don’t know how to turn off my Chronos, because it is an old model with a switch on the bottom. Invariably, I hear them swiftly pounding on the buttons and getting nowhere.
Then you place your right hand, palm down on the top of your head.
Then with your left hand, instead of rubbing your tummy, you press the center button of the clock while at the same time pressing either side button five times, all the while saying, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home…”
Is that really how you do it? That seems absurd. No wonder I couldn’t figure it out. At a local free scholastic tournament I help out at we have a few clocks for use at the end of the round. Mostly it’s DGT NAs with a couple of other types. There’s one chronos that’s never used because nobody there knows how to configure it. I once turned it on accidently (the center button got pushed I guess) while putting other stuff away. I tried every button combination I could think of, but couldn’t turn it off. I couldn’t even take the batteries out, since it needed a screwdriver.
