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Game Courier Tournament #4: An Introductory Semi-Potluck. A tournament to feature games good for introducing people to Chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Thu, Dec 31, 2009 08:34 PM UTC:

The time controls should meet these goals:

(1) A game should generally take no longer than two months, proceeding at a pace of approximately one turn per day.

(2) Players should be able to take off extended periods of time occasionally.

(3) Games should be allowed to continue for as long as it takes to finish them.

To meet the first two goals, the time controls should encourage those who will be taking off time to move as quickly as they can while able, both before and after taking time off. To encourage making moves before taking time off, making moves should be able to extend the time a player has available to take off. But it should not extend it to the point where a player can take several extended vacations or play very slowly. Using bonus time with a maximum on the time a player has available should accomplish these goals.

To encourage moving afterward, the chance of running out of time should remain. So the bonus time given for moving quickly should not be too generous.

The third goal may be met with grace time, minimum time, or a combination of the two. Grace time gets deducted from the time used. Minimum time extends the time someone has left when his time left falls below the minimum. So if a person has 12 hours of each, they will allow 24 hours to make a move.

With this in mind, I will add bonus time, maximum time, and minimum time values to the time controls I already posted. So here is what I expect to use for time controls:

Spare Time: 2 weeks
Grace Time: 12 hours
Minimum Time: 12 hours
Bonus Time: 6 hours for moving within 1 second (before 12 hours grace time is up)
Maximum Time: 4 weeks