With Game 90, i60, the length of the game is likely to be around 4.5 hours, if both sides use up the full amount of the increment over 40 moves. A 60 move game would be over 5 hours long. At best, you can use this method for a maximum of only two rounds per day. Because of the indeterminate length of the games, you might have to put at least 1 hour more time between rounds. For example, round times of 10 - 4 each day will likely be necessary. For fast players, this will lead to a lot of dead time between rounds. If you tighten up to 10 - 2:30 to account for these fast players, you can get in an additional round at 7 pm, but at the risk of having long games throw off your schedule and have the third game starting at 8 pm or later. The length of the playing day might preclude FIDE rating the event.
+1.
These are some of the points of a shorter increment or delay that also apply to 60 second increment, However, 60 second increment also helps mitigate time pressure situations more.
There is a variation in the Exchange Variation of the Grunfeld Defense where the players can play 42 moves quickly, giving them 130 minutes each to contemplate the next few moves before rattling off another forced sequence of move when a TN is played, adding more time. There are Marshall Attack lines in the Spanish Game that are like this, too. It is strange to end up with more time than what you started with.
And is this something that we should be mitigating? Shouldn’t a certain amount of time pressure be part of the game?
No, the game should be decided based on players skill on the board as much as possible.
Then why have time limits at all? Set your time limit as G/1200;d0, and welcome to London 1851.
I already answered that above
A more relevant question is why 30 second increment is insufficient and 60 is needed. Yes, I know 60 gives “more” time; anyone can see that. So would 2 minutes, or 3, or 5, or 10, though the clocks themselves won’t support that. But why we need “more” than 30 seconds is a case Micah has yet to make.
+1
If there was demand for 60, 90 or 120 seconds of increment, clocks would exist that supported it and that capability would be promoted heavily.
Thirty second increment isn’t insufficient but sixty is better simply because it gives you more time for each move when in time pressure. More than sixty would give you even more time but there has to be a balance between having a long increment to mitigate time pressure and making sure games don’t last too long and I think sixty gives a good balance. One nice thing about sixty second increment is that for the clocks that don’t show seconds from the start, you can still tell if the increment is set on the clock when a player presses the clock.
I think the game should be decided on the players skill period, time management is part of that.
+1
IA Stewart Reuben told me that when he originally introduced increment into FIDE events, he specified 30 seconds as the absolute minimum. He then added, ruefully, of course that’s what FIDE went with, even though 60 seconds makes a lot more sense. For any events that Stewart organized, such as Gibraltar Open, the 60 second increment was used and liked by the players. The time control in Gibraltar Open back in the day was 90/30, SD/30 + 60s inc from move 30, one round per day.
In the Austin Chess Club, we have been using G/90+60 time control for 4-5 years now. We do get complaints from players coming to our tournaments from out of town that it is too slow. Personally, I like 60-sec increment better than 30-sec increment, because 60 seconds let me keep a neat score. With 30 seconds, keeping a neat score takes too big of a portion of my time per move, so I end up with something resembling Bobby Fischer’s score sheets.
Michael Langer
Austin, TX
A lot of time controls that make sense at one round per day make much less with two and no sense at all at 3.
If G/90 i30 is a good time control, then i60 might do a little better with a shorter base time, although of course you are effectively reducing the player’s ability to manage their time usage.
And then you contradicted yourself - if you say, as you did, that the game is to be determined by skill on the board alone then you are arguing for no time control at all.
I didn’t contradict myself at all. What I said was that the game should be determined by skill on the board as much as possible with the understanding that having some sort of time control is necessary so the games don’t last too long.
At the Austin Chess Club, we run G/90+60 tournaments with 2 rounds per day, with optional 3rd round per day on Saturday morning with a reduced time control.
While increasing increment time vs. main time reduces the player’s ability to manage their time usage, what’s more important is that it ties more strongly the allotted thinking time to the length of the game.
When one schedules a tournament, you have to decide how long a playing session will be. With one round per day, this is usually seven hours; with two, five to (at most) six; with three, four at the outside. With the usual calculation of sixty moves, your options (comparing 30 and 60 second increments) are something like:
Four hours: G/90+30 vs G/60+60
Five hours: G/120+30 vs G/90+60
Six hours: 40/90,SD/60;+30 vs 40/90,SD/30;+60
Can we agree that +60 is a bad idea at four hours? That’s really going to penalize players in games with tricky middle game positions. That’s putting half the session into increment time. (Basically, it “mitigates” time pressure, while making time pressure itself more likely). Of the two six hour controls, I (personally) like the +60 better than the +30, though more than a few people have argued in favor of an hour at the secondary time control (gives you an opportunity to take a breather). At five hours, there are games where one would probably prefer to be playing at the +30 (complex opening/middle game) and games where one would probably prefer to be playing at the +60 (complex end game). Since the former are substantially more common than the latter, I would think the +30 would be the better choice overall.
Of course, the other consideration with multiple rounds per day is that +60 games are much more likely to be schedule-wreckers. I think if you take everything into consideration, +60 is probably only a good schedule for six+ hour sessions.
G/90+60 (5-hour TC) worked well for us at the Austin Chess Club for mid-size (150 players) weekend Swisses with 2 rounds per day. We’ve run about half a dozen tournaments like that (5-rounders and 7-rounders), and all the rounds started on time.
Any 6-hour TC is pushing it for the 2 rounds per day (even though I do realize that this has been and still is the prevalent modus operandi for big US Swisses). With 60-sec increment, it’s pushing it to the breaking point.
In other words, I am sure many people experienced round delays at 6-hr TC 2-games a day events. 60-sec increment will probably make the delays more common. 5-hr TC with 60 sec increment doesn’t have this problem.