It was quite depressing to find out that my team of stalwarts from the old East Brunswick Chess Club qualified for the Senior Team category this year at the USATE. I thought I had recovered from the shock by Sunday … until we sat down to play the third round. My YOUNG opponent showed up with a borrowed Chronos clock. All well and good, except that it was improperly set.
It was an older model and no one on either team knew how to change the preset. Out came my trusty BHB.
The YOUNGSTER looked at it, looked at me, and asked,
“How does it work?”
I’m home now. In my rocking chair. With my comforter. And my hot chocolate.
A friend of mine has one of those old Chronos models. There are no user-definable presets. You have to set it up each time you turn it on. There is one mode with a delay, but it has only one time control, with a maximum setting of 99:59. To use it with a 2-hour control you’d have to do something like set it for 60:00, then after both players have used up at least 30 minutes add 60:00.
My own Chronos is slightly newer, but it still has a switch on the bottom. It has 8 (instead of 12) user-definable presets, and all the functionality I’ve ever needed. It even has a few nice features that were dropped from the first of the later (switchless) models.
