I am pretty sure that with practice it is possible to play 5+1s “comfortably”, even 19x19 games. This is not the point. The point is that most people who accept these games lose by timeout.
But I agree with you, if the initial time is higher it’s easier (of course). It’s hard to know/decide where to draw the line though.
The tricky part is to decide, how many “loss by timeout” are because they ran out of time to think of / play the next move, and how many are “this seemed like a good place to resign, but it was easier to just let my clock run down”
Playing with 2s increments, "this seemed like a good place to resign, but it was easier to just let my clock run down” seems much more common. Timeouts are usually before the first 6 moves.
Even in those with 1s, when I tried 10 of them, 7 belonged to the second category (of the other 3, one was a game inI was losing, 2 ended very early). I don’t have much experience with 1s unfortunately (precisely because I don’t like games to end in timeouts).
It should be considered that resigning takes more than playing a normal move. “It was easier” does not necessarily imply that it was voluntary. It is difficult to make that decision so quickly.
But what’s the limit then? As KoBa pointed out, it would make a lot of sense to allow rated games at the standard time controls of all other servers. Is 3m+1s Fischer unacceptable?
I understand what you’re saying and agree that 5s+1s is probably too short for rated games for the reasons you’ve stated, but surely after a certain amount of main time, a 1s increment is perfectly reasonable, since you could basically regard it as an “easier/more forgiving” absolute time.
I’d personally be in favor of allowing a 1s increment starting at a certain minimum main time (for 9x9, specifically).
(Just to be clear, my questions at the top of this comment aren’t rhetorical. I’m just looking for a clear answer to try and better understand exactly what is being discussed, so I’m sorry if I’m coming off as overly persnickety or difficult )
Its not really fast thinking. I will probably not be able to click fast enough to put the stone where I want to on the board. 4-5s is pretty much a minimum.
Oops. I think it’s fixed now?
Accroding to those calculations (on 19x19), 3m+1s is 2.5s per move on average, while 5s+1s is more like 1.0s per move on average. That’s a significant difference. Maybe 2-2.5s per move on average is a reasonable lower limit?
@gennan here reminded me of this thread.
I did not remember that it was said that 1s per move is impossible!
Notes (from that time): D4 was a misclick and D2 simply bad. I could have done better probably. Sampi was better
I still remember my attempts in trying to break the 1sec/move barrier, I gave up after never finishing a complete 19x19 game