How would I calculate the time needed to have a site available to run a G60, inc 30 tnmt with 4 Rds?
Craig Hines, Local TD and President, Indiana State Chess Assn.
Figure the increment adds 30 minutes per side. Add time between rounds for results entry/pairing/posting/player movement/etc. Add time to compensate for a long-running game. The National Open has 1.5 hours between the calculated end of a round and the start of the next on the same day. You may not need that much time.
I do 10am, 1pm, 4pm, 7pm. It’s a very long day first and second there can be situations where the rounds start 30-60 minutes after the advertised start time based on completion of the prior round.
You need to figure out also if you’re going to give people that finish late time off between rounds as a break and when you’d figure in any lunch break if you’re going to give one.
Sevan,
Does that equate to 30 minutes per player/per game, or per game? IOW: would an inc/30 create 30 minutes or 1 hour to the game?
- 30/sec based on 60 moves is 30 minutes per player; thus 1 hour for the game.
Assuming it’s just 60 moves. I’ve had 100+ move games because someone got the bright idea to play out a lost endgame.
I’m far from an expert but I’d find it hard to do a 4 round tourney in one day that is G/60 inc 30. I agree with Sivan that your might be able to do rounds at 10, 1, 4 and 7 but you run the risk of starting the last round 60+ minutes late and then having it go for more than 3 hours.
Yep. This is a great example of a topic from a recent thread: There is no reason increment has to be 30 seconds per move. I played a friendly match at G/60 Inc-15 a few years ago. That worked well; it might be worth a try for the one-day G/60 event you suggest. (At the time that was the slowest control that could be Dual-rated, which my opponent wanted. It is no longer Quick-ratable.)
I would guess Sevan’s tournaments are designed to get players FIDE-rated ASAP, and folks who show up know the score and brace for a potential marathon. Assuming that FIDE ratings are not an issue, I would suggest either a shorter increment, or one round less, or a shorter base time, in that order—though that’s ordered by my personal preference and your player base may feel differently.
With 30-second increment and four rounds in one day, someday you will see a 120-move Q+P ending that wrecks the schedule and players’ patience. Could be years from now, or it could be the next time you try it.
Base control of 50 to 60 minutes and increment of 15 or 20 seconds sounds like a plan. Will give players a chance to practice setting their clocks, too…
If the increment is less than 30 seconds, then you must drop the rules on requiring writing the move down every move. Some of us write slowly; arthritis and poor penmanship are bad partners to have together. If you want to run an event with 15 second increment then rules adjustments are necessary, announced in advance.
This was one of the fears I had when increment started to become popular. Someone would start fooling around with it, making it shorter and shorter. When you lower it enough, increment then becomes barely different than delay. Then we are back to “clock bashing” monkey games again.
It’s already in the rules that with increment of less than 30 seconds the players may stop recording moves once one player goes below five minutes. There is nothing to adjust or announce. (I could see if you tried something funky like 29-seconds of increment, then you should explain exactly what the rules are.)
Correct the reason is to make it FIDE ratable. However it’s not just to get players a FIDE rating. Class players do not have a lot of opportunities to have play that affects their FIDE rating.
No need to wait. This has happened before. And we’ve had the game end at 11pm after watching two tired fighters miss simple end game wins.
I had thought when I started to do the 4R-60/30 events that I’d lose the majority of people in the 4th round. I found that only about 20-25% disappear. The rest all stay to play.
You can do Quads with this time control also and get only 3 rounds then in the day. That has worked quite well as well.
But honestly if you’re not going to do a true increment (30-sec) and you’re playing a slower game just do 10-sec delay at that point.
If a game runs long, the adjournment rules remain in the book for a reason. Don’t be afraid to use them; hand the weaker player an envelope and make him or her seal.
The weaker player? Isn’t it the person on move at the end of the “playing session”?
Technically, yes. But if the game has gone on long enough to need adjournment, it is very likely both players are “living on the increment,” so the end of the playing session can be somewhat fungible. It may take the TD 30 seconds or so to get over to the board and present the envelope. 
Then don’t you set a “drop dead” time for pairing the next round like (say) 5:30 and make that the “end of session”. (With the hope that the threat of adjourning and having the game paired as W-D will get one of the players to relent).
Perhaps I was being too cute in my reply. What I meant to say was that, with an “end of session” time of 5:30, the actual adjournment might happen at 5:30:00, or 5:30:15, or 5:30:30, or 5:30:40 … With a 30 second increment, and with players “living on the increment” and basically moving within 30 seconds, it would be easy for a TD to present the sealed move envelope to the weaker player and still be within one minute of the specified end of session.
There is always this option as a last resort, but adjournment defeats the purpose of a SD or G/xx time control. That’s why I suggest that for more than two rounds per day it makes sense to use a shorter increment.
But you hand it to whomever is on move when you arrive at the board? (I wonder if many players nowadays are familiar with stories of players blitzing off a godawful blunder when the arbiter approached with the sealed move envelope).
Of course, one real problem with this is that historically adjournment always took place in a second or third time control when the player sealing had a big chunk of new time to devote to choosing the move (if needed). Now, you could easily have barely have more than 30 seconds.
This is the point. What constitutes a “true” increment? (Thread drift alert.)
It might already be too late, but we—the chessplayers and directors of the world—never got to see real-life experiments to test cumulative vs. non-cumulative methods of added time, as well as different lengths of each method compared to base time controls, not to mention comparing the several ways to implement non-cumulative add-back, such as Bronstein, count-down and “straight” delay with blinking symbols.
Before we knew it, FIDE settled on 30-second increment for Standard-rated games and USCF settled on 5-second delay for Regular-rated games. Both are plausible for their intended purpose, but there is nothing magical about either number, nor sacred about using increment rather than delay, or vice versa.
Now that we no longer have a standard delay length in USCF-rated chess, let’s try different things and see what people think. For instance, one foreign organizer pushed 60-second increment for slow-control events with one round per day. Might be worth a try at a club filled with old patzers not in a hurry: G/60+60 maybe?
How about a quad series that alternates between increment one week/month and delay the next month? Or where Bronstein is used in place of “straight” delay, if the organizer can round up enough Bronstein-capable clocks?
On what basis did FIDE decide that Fischer is better than Bronstein and that 30 seconds should be the standard? On what basis did USCF decide that Bronstein/delay is better than Fischer/increment? For a rating system that goes as fast as G/30, at least we see why USCF chose 5 instead of 30 as the standard seconds per move. And now folks are trying 10 seconds instead…
The Inner Circle of rules and clocks geeks had these debates 15 years ago. It seems they tired of trying to explain things to players with arms folded tight, cradling their analog clocks. (As they moaned about losing G/30 games on time from winning positions.)
Now that these players own digital clocks and in most cases know how to set them, it makes sense to try things other than increment-30 and delay-5.
Thanks to all who replied to my original post. My take away from all this is that a 1 day 30 sec increment tnmt is not really practical. It does seem like something I may bring up to my board for the State Class and State Championships which are 2-3 day events with slower time controls. Again thanks everybody for your time and information.
Craig[
It might be slightly more accurate to say that a 1-day, 4-round, G/60 inc/30 event is on the edge of practicality.
If you want to get a little further away from the edge, either make it 2 days or just 3 rounds or a faster increment, like 10 or 15 seconds.
Bill Smythe