Time settings on Clocks under the USCF rules

[narceleb]

@Matt Phelps

@narceleb

The whole “40 moves in whatever” is a completely useless relic from the days of mechanical clocks, repeating time controls, and adjournments.

One time control for the whole game, please.

There’s something to be said for reserving a chunk of time for the endgame, which has suffered from lack of quality in the era of sudden death.

As a TD/Arbiter though, I agree that a single time control, with 30 second increment is the least prone to incident.

-Matt Phelps

There is no really good way of dealing with that – we are just not going back to adjournments. The 30-second increment does help, though.

What we have seen a lot of, over many, many years, are blunders in time trouble.

[ILfish]

For those who don’t remember the original “GameTimer” had the problem of players hitting the clock quickly in succession. So, in a blitz type situation there would be both players hitting the clock and making moves as quick as possible. This caused the original “GameTimer” to not record moves on the move counter. As a result the time control could have been made by both players, and the clock would indicate [red light] that time had expired for one of the players. I believe this is not a problem for the more modern electronic clocks, but you can still find a few of the original “GameTimer” clocks being used. You can tell the difference between “GameTimer I” and “GameTimer II” as the more modern/recent clock has increment.

Larry S. Cohen