It’s been stated before on this forum that for a FIDE rated tournament that if, for example, the time control is G/90;inc30 then all games must be played with that exact time control.
I noticed this upcoming FIDE rated tournament, https://coconinochess.us/, where the time control is G/90;inc30 and it says in the regulations, https://coconinochess.us/COreg.pdf, that clocks without increment or delay play G/120;d0. Does this mean the FIDE rules have changed here?
It is not possible to register a FIDE rated tournament with multiple time controls, therefore the expectation is that all games are played using the time control in the registration for the event. This tournament is registered as “Standard: 90 minutes with 30 second increment from move 1” and therefore the expectation is all games will be played at that time control, https://ratings.fide.com/tournament_information.phtml?event=472867
I imagine if this had been mentioned to the FIDE Events Manager when registering the tournament, that person would have advised that you cannot mix time controls in FIDE-rated events.
In the regulations for title events, e.g. norm awarding events, this is specifically against the rules, “In any title tournament the time controls and clock settings for all games must be identical, except as defined in Guidelines III of the Laws of Chess or in the event of a re-pairing in the case of a default, with the agreement of both players. If the time control is increment based, all players must use increment; if delay based, all players must use delay; if no increment or delay is specified, then all players must compete with no increment and no delay. There can be no mixed use of clock settings (increment, delay, none at all).”
It is absolutely possible to send an email to fide@uschess.org that explicitly lists multiple time controls:
· Full playing schedule: Saturday 9:00 AM, 12:15 PM, 5:30 PM; Sunday 9:00 AM, 3:30 PM; Monday 9:00 AM, 2:00 PM
· All time controls: G/60;i30 round one, G/90;i30 all rounds following
And receive a response that the tournament has been registered with FIDE.
FIDE may then convert that into:
But as a matter of “what can an organizer submit for a registration and get a positive response from US Chess”, mixed time controls (inside the same rating system and for a non-norm tournament) are 100% possible.
These events should be registered as two separate tournaments with FIDE as each registration can only handle on time control. G/60;+30 has a different requirement from G/90;+30 (G/60;+30 is not ratable for players rated 2400 and above) and so the games from such an event should never be mixed, regardless of them both being Standard rated by FIDE.
When I was the FIDE Events Manager, I would advise anyone who submitted a registration like this that there would be two separate FIDE registrations and the games would have to be separated and submitted as such.
This did actually come up, and one game was not rated with FIDE from the first round as a result.
Two questions on that front.
Yes. SwissSys actually created this ability on my behalf for the FIDE tournament report to only select certain rounds because of this actual scenario.
The USCF allows an alternate time setting on the rule book where one can put in the TLA that players with non delay clocks can play a time control of G/35, d/0 which is opposed to G/30, d/5. How is that entered into MUIR? Don’t you just file the games as G/30, d/5 regardless of who played G/35, d/0? Thus, maybe the FIDE games were entered as G/90; inc30 even though some had played G/120; d0.
Is the desired format in that case to have one TRF with just R1 and another with R1-R7 with R1 having byes of the proper value?
When delay first came out it was common practice to list the non-delay time and deduct the delay from the base time (40/90, SD/60 with no delay became 40/85, SD/60; d5) That is a big reason for older clocks to have a G/1:55 or G/1:25 setting. Many strong players looked at that and realized that most games were essentially decided within the first 40 mioves and decided they’d rather have the extra five minutes of base time instead of the maximum of 3 minutes and 20 seconds of delay time for the first 40 moves. The would deliberately not set the delay on their clocks so that they would have more time in most of their games.
Getting 60 moves worth of increment before move one may be seen as better than only getting 30 seconds per move, and only hurts in some of the minority of game that go over 60 moves.
The G/120;d0 as a substitute (under FIDE rules) is clearly wrong. Wouldn’t the “correct” (or perhaps “least bad”) approach if you are stuck with a game with just a mechanical clock be to set it at G/90;d0 then when a increment-capable clock becomes available to set it to time shown + increment x number of moves made. With G/120;d0, if you have 10 minutes showing at move 30, you have overstepped as you really had only 105 minutes to make 30 moves and you’ve used 110.
No. FIDE doesn’t care about standings in their crosstables, they just want rated games to be rated appropriately and games that cannot be rated must be excluded and there is no need to put strange byes in for them to make the crosstable accurate (although US Chess actually does try to do this).
So in this instance, using SwissSys, you would tell it to create a TRF using round 1 to round 1 for the 1 round tournament and then tell it to create a TRF using round 2 to round 7 for the 6 round tournament.
Would someone tell what “TRF” stands for as related to SwissSys?
Nothing specifically, but it’s a Tournament Report Format file, which is the FIDE equivalent of the 3 .DBF files used to upload a tournament result.
TRF-2026 is now going to become the new standard for FIDE. As someone already mentioned, TRF stands for Tournament Report File, which is used by the office to submit an event for FIDE rating to FIDE.
Here’s the info on TRF-2026, https://tec.fide.com/trf-2026/
20 years ago it was called the Krause format, named for the person who developed the first version of it, Christian Krause.
There is very little difference between TRF-2026 and the previous TRF-2016 as it relates to submission for rating purposes. Many of the changes with 2026 were for the use by the FIDE TEC for checking tournament hosting programs, and there are also some changes to theoretically allow interchange of information between different programs during the tournament. It’s pretty clumsy for the latter purpose—it looks like they are actually working behind the scenes on a JSON alternative for that.
Chris, if we are not allowed to mix clock times with FIDE, then is it required that 2 player opponents cannot play a competition chess game because they don’t have the correct clock?
You’ve got to understand that in the majority of FIDE-rated events worldwide, all chess equipment, including clocks, is normally provided by the organizer and therefore you do not usually see the issues you see in the US with a multitude of differing clocks at an event.
The FIDE regulations state that all FIDE-rated events must use the FIDE Laws and regulations for them to be rated, hence why you would normally disallow a clock that is not capable of the time control for your event. Thankfully most digital clocks are capable of doing most time controls nowadays and it’s been a long while since I’ve run into anyone wanting to use an analog clock.
Of course if there is nothing better to use then some arbiters/TDs may indeed just do whatever they need to do to get the games played. Will anyone ever find out, or even care? Probably not, but I personally always prefer to err on the side of meeting the regulations.
And what is the regulation? The players get forfeited for not having a clock that can’t be set to the tournament time control?
One crazy possibility might be 20/90;d0, 20/10;d0 with no sudden death time control (eliminating 14H claims). Essentially the increment comes in 20 move chunks at the end of the 20 moves. More forgiving would be 20/95;d0 for the first time control with each 20 moves having extra increment time for the first half and less time for the second half.