Well yes, procrastinators will always be with us (there were time trouble addicts long before there was delay), and they will use as much time as they are given. That doesn’t mean we should give them unlimited time. We can control how much of our time they are allowed to waste (this is why we have clocks in the first place). For me, a 5-second delay is a reasonable place to draw the line. I don’t like encouraging people who can’t make up their mind to waste even more of my time than they are already wasting.
I disagree. I think there is a completely different philosophy behind delay and increment. Delay is supposed to provide reaction time. That is if you have a reasonable position and an unreasonable amount of time you should be able to make a move that doesn’t lose without the last precious seconds ticking off. Five seconds is enough time to react. More is inefficient at best, unfair at worst.
Increment exists to bring the game to its natural conclusion, as near as possible. As such it not only gives players more time per move, but it allows the gain of time, or, rather, if they move quickly enough they get to carry the unused time over to the next move, so it is possible to have a longer think on positions that really require it in a way that just isn’t possible with delay. The downside, of course, is that it requires not only more time between rounds but greater uncertainty whether you’ll be able to meet that. It is poor practice to organize a tournament with an increment of at least thirty seconds and days with more than one round and not be prepared to adjourn games.
Alex Relyea
So, to sum up, you say blitz should be d/0, but that’s too fast for you so you never play blitz.
That’s not really about increment vs delay, though. That’s about 30 seconds vs 5 seconds.
Bill Smythe
Suggest spinning off the increment/delay discussion to another thread. We are no longer talking about the US Open.
As far as increment and scorekeeping requirements, as I recall the increment has to be a lot more than 5 seconds for scorekeeping to be mandatory even in time trouble. (Of course one could argue that with sufficient increment, ‘time trouble’ doesn’t really exist.)
3+2 seems to make more sense than 3d2 for online blitz events, it gives some allowance for the occasional delays in online chess servers.
Splitting this thread seems worthwhile.
To add on to your last point about being able to argue that “time trouble” doesn’t really exist with a sufficient increment, the US Chess rulebook defines the term “time pressure” as “a situation where either player has less than five minutes left in a time control and the time control does not include an increment or delay of 30 seconds or more.”
Due to this definition of “time pressure”, rules 15B-“Scorekeeping in time pressure, non-sudden death time control”, and 15C-“Scorekeeping in time pressure, sudden death time control” should be updated to make scorekeeping required for every move if there is a delay of at least 30 seconds.
Yes, but that’s not as contradictory as it sounds. I actually don’t play anything faster than G/90 anymore, but this has nothing to do with delay and/or increment. I am a terrible “intuitive” player. If I just make the first move that pops into my head, a high percentage of those moves will be blunders. In order to play reasonable chess, I need to be able to methodically evaluate the position, do blunder checks, etc. – and I need to do this on every move. I can’t play that way at faster time controls. At G/90, I can play reasonable chess. At anything much faster than that, I’m a blunder factory. In blitz, I might as well save time and just start the game by laying my King down.
Delay and increment are different issues entirely. As I’ve indicated in other posts, I have no use for increment. I think (in principle) that delay is essential for any sudden death time control, but I also think that it’s only really needed in the time trouble phase of the game (5 minutes or less remaining), and for people who manage their time reasonably, time trouble is only likely to happen at the quicker time controls that I don’t play. So I’m not sure that delay is all that important for G/90 or longer, and it wouldn’t bother me too much to see it disappear from those time controls (or maybe to be in effect only when the time gets under 5 minutes). It also wouldn’t bother me to see the “delay only in time trouble” policy used for all SD time controls. Even at something like G/30, there’s no real need for delay until time trouble looms.
All of this sounds like blitz would be the game where delay is most needed, right? But, as I said in my previous post, blitz is a different game. Time trouble is an intrinsic part of the game, by design. In “regular” chess, you want it to be about how well you play, not how fast you play. But in blitz, it is about how fast you play, and that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s the way the game is designed to be, and delay defeats the purpose. It’s the perfect game for time-trouble addicts. This is all academic, though. Since I don’t play blitz and I don’t direct blitz, they can do whatever they want and it won’t bother me. I’m only talking about principles.
This topic is a spin-off from US Open in US Chess Issues.