In the recently concluded New England Open, the following issue came up. The time control was 40/120, SD/60. The players were using a Chronos clock with the move counter set, so that it added an hour after the fortieth move. It also was not displaying seconds. It was White’s clock, I assume, as Black didn’t know how to use it, as will become obvious.
In any event, somehow the move counter became advanced by one move. Thus, after the 39th move the clock added an hour. At some point after Black’s 39th move, White’s clock read 1:00. Black asked White to stop the clock, and it took a few seconds for White to understand this and to do so. Black then summoned a TD and claimed a win on time. They looked at the settings, and the clock showed that White had 1:00:00 “remaining”. Subsequent tests with another Chronos clock showed that the second counter changes after the second had expired, so at that time White had used up his first two hours. At this point, Black left. White appealed, having not signed the scoresheet or done anything to indicate that he had lost.
Situations like this one are exactly why I hate move counters. Frankly, I think their use should be banned.
In any case, assuming that, as Xplor points out, Black did not neglect to record a move, it was correct to award the time forfeit. The fact that White’s clock shows an hour, rather than zero, should not protect him. The requirement was to make 40 moves in two hours and White apparently did not do this.
Edit: Now that I think of it, a similar situation would occur without the move counter as well. Using a Chronos, as long as one does not set the option to freeze the clock when it reaches zero in the first control, if White uses up the last of his time at move 35 (for example), his clock will add an hour and continue. Black could still make the forfeit claim any time before move 40, even if he didn’t notice it until move 39 and White’s clock had moved down a dozen minutes by then.
I agree with Hal. I seriously dislike clocks with move counters that “magically” add time when the clock thinks the right number of moves have been made. On the other hand, I think the “DL-SD2” Chronos mode is unambiguous in such a case. One always sees the remaining time down to the second, and it is clear when the player has used up the time for the first control and moved on to the second.
Perhaps intentionally, Alex left out one interesting point about White’s appeal. White owns the clock. Black did not know how to stop the clock, so Black told White “stop the clock” and then claimed that White had not met the time control. White believed it took perhaps four seconds to process Black speaking to him and to actually stop the clock. Even if White’s reflexes allowed him to stop the clock within one second, it appeared that White had not yet actually overstepped the time limit when Black told him to stop the clock. (Based on that, the ruling was that the time forfeit claim was incorrect. White was awarded two minutes for the incorrect claim, and the game continued.)
The Chronos has a perfectly good mode that displays the delay counting down and does NOT display a move counter. This setting is the one I have always used.
The USCF rules are quite clear that move counters are considered to be unreliable and should not be used. Setting the clock to add time when it thinks you have made the right number of moves is simply wrong. Better is to add time when the previous TIME runs out.
Of course, with manual clocks, we are used to resetting the clock at a particular MOVE - but if the clock is to do it automatically it is better to add the time when the previous TIME runs out - no matter what move the clock thinks it is.
You specified a “manual” clock, by which I thought you meant an “analog” (“real”) clock. There are certainly a few digital clocks which have to be reset after the first time control.
At my club we play 40/90, SD/30. The merits of this vs. GAME/120 notwithstanding, if you’re using a “real” clock, you have to add a half hour at move 40. Last year I was in a tournament where the TD subtracted a half hour in a similar situation, but I digress.
Ken’s right about what happened. I intentionally left out the resolution of the problem so I could see what other people thought. When Black came back we ruled that he had asked White to stop the clock to make an incorrect claim, and therefore White would have two minutes added to the clock and the game would continue from that point. Since White claimed to be able to repeat the position at that point, the players agreed that the game was drawn.
The odds of the clock being stopped at EXACTLY 1:00:00 are rather small, aren’t they?
Something strikes me as fishy about the way White set HIS clock. I don’t think I would have awarded the 2 minutes, because (at a minimum) White was a contributor to the confusion by improperly setting his clock.
I would also wonder why Black was asking White to stop the clock if White had 4… 3… 2… 1… seconds left on his clock. Why would he ask him to stop the clock if White still had time remaining? Unless Black admitted that he asked him to stop the clock while White had something other than 1:00:00 on his clock then I don’t see the reason for the ruling.
Personally, I would have ruled in black’s favor. He didn’t give the courtesy of showing black how to pause the clock as he is supposed to do. He didn’t set it correctly (Rule books says don’t use move counters as has been pointed out). So, if for some reason he ‘lost’ 4 seconds in the shuffle (which is very doubtful) then it was his own fault for not obeying the intent if not the letter of the rules. I won’t speculate further, but I don’t think it would have mattered, because from the wording he had been thinking for a bit and probably wouldn’t have touched the clock in the next ‘4 seconds’ if black hadn’t asked him to.
It happened to me at the US Open. I was using my long lost Chronos (someone seems to have stolen it at the US Open…sigh) in the mode where time is added when the previous TIME expires. My opponent was short of time at the first time control. He made the move on the board, pressed the clock, and the clock read 1:00:00. Just a second previous, it had read 0:00:01.
First - note that the clock stopped EXACTLY at 1:00:00 (we can later argue accuracy vs. precision - but it was EXACT to the precision you chose).
Second - if I had called you to the board to claim a time forfeit, how would you have ruled?
Third - it didn’t matter, it was mate in on the board and it was easier to execute the mate than to find a TD at the US Open.
If Black makes his 40th move in a 40/2, SD/1 USCF tournament, and, after pressing the clock the display shows 1:00:00 remaining (assuming the clock was set originally to count down starting at 2:00:00 or 1:55:00 + 5’ delay), that would mean that Black has used up exactly two hours (or 1 hour 55 minutes + 5 seconds) of his game time (not counting the additional delay time for each move), before completing his 40th move. White’s claim of a win by time forfeit at that point would depend on whether his scoresheet were complete. However, if Black’s clock were capable of displaying any time reimaining in tenths of a second, then that would prove that Black had not used up exactly the entire two hours (but almost all of it, up to a fraction of a second), in which case he would have just made the time control.
According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, can we be sure of exactly what move it is, or what the exact time is on the player’s clock but not both?
Close, but no cigar. In this mode, the clock will onlyl read 1:00:00 when 1 hour has just been added BECAUSE THE PREVIOUS TIME WENT TO 0:00:00. There cannot be any “tenths of seconds”. If there were, then there would not be an added hour.
So, the fact that is says 1:00:00 means that the previous time has expired. Flag down.
(and, of course, there is a positive feature on the display that changes from one position when still in the first time control to a different position when you are in a subsequent time control - that’s the “flag”, and it’s down).