“TD TIP:
The director may apply penalties against a player’s time before the game begins, causing the players to
start the game with different times on the clock. This does not affect the ratability of the game.”
what are some situations that one would receive a time penalty before the start of a game?
…scot…
One example would be behavior in the previous round after the game in that round is over. The most common example might be cell phone ringing, but refusal to follow a rule or causing a disturbance would be some other examples.
A time penalty in a future round might be the best option when a player does something that needs a penalty greater than a warning, but the infraction doesn’t warrant removal from the event.
David Hater
I have seen Jeff Wiewel use this idea when someone does not want to keep score - “we can always set your clock to 5 minutes…”
That usually changes the player’s mind.
On a related note, we have occasionally had players who could not keep score for religious reasons (e.g., Orthodox Jews on certain days). They are usually agreeable to having some time deducted from their clocks, although this isn’t really a “penalty”.
That is provided for in the rules.
My last name follows “i before e except after c…”.
Sorry - I get the same issue with my last name at times. I’ve corrected my posts - can’t fix the quotes.
I have known a few players, some of them very high rated, who would consider it a great benefit to have their time reduced to 5 minutes in order to dispense with writing moves. Their blitz skills would likely rattle their opponents, making the time differential meaningless. Since they have lots of practice playing at fast time controls, taking time from them is not much of a penalty. I don’t think it is good to enable “clock bashing monkeys”, especially at the beginning of the game, where they have the chance to disturb many other players with their blitz antics. Besides, the player may accuse the TD of violation of Rule 21K on TD use of power and discretion for reducing the time to only 5 minutes.
If the behavior is egregious, usually you see a player forfeit a game or be removed from the lists. What to do about alleged “semi-egregious” behavior? First, you need to define what penalties are appropriate and applicable. Second, rather than reduce time, a possible penalty is to remove a half point from the final score. I know that is not one of the suggested penalties, but in an in between situation this should get the player’s attention that his behavior will have consequences for his final standing. This would be another one of the occasions where the rating report would differ from the standings.
Only if the opponent opts to also play “blitz” would work out. When I have my opponent in time trouble I find complicating the game is more effective than trying to flag the player (and I do fairly well at blitz).
TDs try to make rulings that allow a game to be decided over the board if plausible, and reducing time to five minutes is plausible (a quicker way of doing multiple five, ten or twenty minute penalties until it is down to five minutes).
PS I first heard of this from NTD Wayne Clark and I’m not sure where he got it from, but it is a fairly well known option.
I once had an opponent who insisted on keeping score during a pair of actual blitz games (this was during the rated blitz tournament at the 2013 US Open). I suspect that this is why I was able to split the two games, even though he significantly outrated me (and was probably a more experienced blitz player as well – I almost never play blitz).
We use to do this in 7-12 G/30 USCF rated scholastics and we soon had multiple games where both experienced players accepted the time reduction to 5 minute game penalty. This converted G/30 rated to 5 minute blitz.
We stopped doing this. No score keeping equals a forfeit lost and withdrawal from the tournament. Both players not keeping score was double forfeit and double withdrawal.
We weren’t *-holes about this. We made repeated announcements and worked with the players to bring them around on this. A very few players decided tournament chess was not for them.
After two tournaments the issue went away.
Just a trivial curiosity: For a couple of years, according to a strictly literal reading of the FIDE Laws of Chess, scorekeeping was required in blitz. This happened a few years ago when the way the Laws defined the rules for rapid (quick) and blitz were rewritten. The new rules for rapid correctly stated that the standard laws of chess applied except for the requirement to record the moves and something else. The new rules for blitz had an editorial error that only stated the requirement for something else was omitted in blitz, leaving out that the requirement to record the moves did not apply.
That was fixed the next time the Laws were revised.
While I agree that a player should be penalized for the next game for causing a disturbance after the player’s game has ended, doesn’t this potentially benefit a player which might not have even been involved?
Ejection of a player or assigning a next-round zero-point bye would not benefit a player’s paired opponent, but it would either give somebody else a full point bye in the next round or remove somebody’s full point bye in the next round, and would change the pairings so that some players get weaker opponents than they otherwise would have. Pretty much any penalty that is assigned to a player has the potential to benefit one or more other players. Failure to apply a penalty to a player can disadvantage others that end up suffering through that effects of that player’s actions.
Applying a time penalty to the next game minimizes the number of other players directly affected and even if the pairings are already posted it can still be seamlessly done without affecting any other players’ pairings.
I do a lot of scholastics and a number of those games do not have clocks. If a time penalty needs to be applied in a game then I will get a clock (in scholastics I generally have some available for long-running clock-less games) and then split the elapsed time and apply the penalty.
PS Another option in medley (individual/team) events is merely removing a player from a team’s roster (particularly for infractions that are team-related) and that would not have any affect on individual games, just on the final team trophy standings. Note that such an action might or might not actually be more severe than simply assigning zero-point byes for the remaining rounds.