I recently did a tournament with a G/90;+30 time control and rounds at 10 AM and 4 PM. A 60 move game starting at 10 AM would finish by 2 PM and a 120 move game by 3 PM (1 hour before the next round). Even a 150 move game would finish by 3:30 PM. A 60 move game starting at 4 PM would finish by 8 PM and a 120 move game by 9 PM (13 hours before the next round). (I would advise against using a +60 increment with more than one round per day.)
If you make the anticipated time between rounds long enough then a 30 second increment is doable (and gives almost all players plenty of time for a lunch break). That is one reason I would not want to use increment for a tournament that people would prefer to finish quickly (such as most scholastics) or for more than two rounds in a day (a lot of tournaments with merging schedules use delay for the first rounds of the later starting schedules before merging with the increment-using long schedule).
A schedule such as you outline is doable, but is about the maximum you can get away with, and even this schedule has it’s drawbacks. If your game lasts only two or three hours, and many will, you will have a long time to kill between rounds.
With events that have 4-5 hours between rounds, I wonder if anyone has run blitz events starting about 90 minutes after a round, for those whose games finish quickly?
I bolded one sentence above.
That already happens at tournaments like the US Open 6-day schedule with delay instead of increment. Whenever you have rounds times separated enough to avoid adjournments you necessarily end up with round times separated enough to have a lot of time to kill for those who finish quickly. For that matter, even when I run ASAP G/25;d5 scholastic tournaments and get rounds entered/paired/posted/started within 5 minutes of the previous round’s last game finishing there are still parents who complain about how long their kids have to sit around waiting after an early finish before most of the other games. (I’ve had parents nagging me to get the tournament rated on the website “right now” even while the last round is still going on - I do confess to some amusement seeing the light dawn on them when I calmly explain what needs to happen before the tournament can be submitted).
It’s a matter of degree. If you run d/10, for example, you don’t need to put nearly as much time between rounds as if you run +30. Early finishers will have to wait no matter what time control you use, even if you have neither delay nor increment, but a TC that includes 30 second increment will magnify that time considerably.
If you set the base time reasonably then you can keep the same round times with the latest finishers often running about as long as before. There may be more early finishers than otherwise but I’ve done plenty of national scholastics at G/120;d5 to know that the great bulk of the players are done long before the final finishers anyway.
I understand what you’re saying, but I think the games were much more corruptible two generations ago when a significant proportion of success in the adjournment depended on the GMs you had in your corner. Or whatever strong players were willing to help the player analyze or to analyze for them when the player sleeps. At least now all players have equal access. The only reason adjournments are so incredibly rare these days is the acceptance of sudden death time controls. It’s also not an entirely bad idea to limit the number of hours a player is expected to play in a day.
If the time control is, for example, G/90, no delay, no increment, then the game cannot last more than three hours, so you can plan the start time for the next round accordingly. If you want to give everyone time for a lunch break you can still start the second round four hours after you start the first one. You can’t do that if the TC is G/90 +30. In the examples cited by Jeff Wiewel the rounds were spaced 6 hours apart. That’s an extra two hours everyone has to wait solely because the tournament schedule needed to account for the possibility of a long game. That’s certainly sub-optimal.
Saying that it’s better now because everyone has a more equal opportunity to cheat is not a very persuasive argument, IMHO. If you think adjournments are a good idea we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I’m on your side, Scott. Even in the old days, when I had an adjournment, I was very strict about doing the analysis myself, with no help from friends, computers, or endgame books. I once had a friend offer to help me analyze an adjournment. He was excited about it – a chance to analyze a real adjournment as a team, just like the big boys do! I turned him down. I would have considered it unethical. I realize that this puts me in a small (and getting smaller) minority, especially these days, but that’s just the way I am. A chess game is between me and my opponent, and nobody else. Any outside assistance during the game is unethical. Since, in general, I can’t hold my opponent to that standard, I want nothing to do with adjournments anymore. I also avoid them as a TD.
Also, it’s not true that everyone has equal opportunity, even now. I’m technologically and financially challenged. The only chess “engine” I have is an old Fidelity computer from the 1990s, proudly labeled as having an official rating of “2325”. That’s still plenty strong enough to help me analyze my games (after the game), but any modern engine would easily wipe the floor with it. I realize that Stockfish is a free download, but I don’t have any device that I can take to a tournament that would be capable of accepting the download. My phone is just a phone.
Aside from all that, adjournments were designed for high-level events where they typically only played one game per day, and often had free days (for adjournments) between rounds. When you’re squeezing 5 games into a 2-day weekend, there just isn’t time, especially with some players taking 3rd-round byes (and therefore disappearing as soon as their 2nd-round game is over). The last time I tried doing adjournments (3 of them in the first round), all 3 involved one such player, and we ended up having to just play out all 3 games and delaying the start of the 2nd round. Never again.
I’m tempted to turn Alex’s reasoning (“The only reason adjournments are so incredibly rare these days is the acceptance of sudden death time controls”) around, and claim that one of the primary reasons why we have sudden death time controls is to make adjournments unnecessary.
I don’t know anyone who thinks adjournments are a “good” idea. (They’re a PITA for both the TD’s and the players). They may, however, be necessary even if the TD/organizer left what would usually be enough time between rounds.
Note, however, that there’s a huge difference between now and the past regarding adjournments. It used to be that you adjourned at (depending upon the situation) 40, 56 or 60 moves (or more specifically after 5, 6 or 7 hours of play with a T/C that required that many moves). That’s middle game or maybe early end game, with possibly many ways to play going forward. And you would have just received an extra hour to expend for your next 16-20 moves. Now, it would be unlikely to adjourn a game before move 100(?). (If you’re adjourning a game at 60, you did something really wrong) and you’re probably looking at at least one if not both players now playing on increment only. Unless a player needed to do nothing more than bone up on Lucena before resumption, she’ll be on her own pretty quickly without a lot of time to figure things out OTB.
At the tournament I ran over Labor Day Weekend, one player was asking me something about his clock and it happened to be the DGT 2000. Do you see the DGT 2000 enough to where you think it would be worth adding to the document?