I believe that this is a heavy point: in a fast correspondence environment, the pace of your opponent is very important.
If your opponent is very fast, you could be unable to keep the rithm, since your clock is always ticking.
An opponent with your same pace doubles your time: making a move a day means that each player spends just 12 hours of their time.
But if one player makes his moves in no time, the other one playing one move a day spends 24 hrs per move.
Your opponent’s speed becomes irrelevant only when your pace fits comfortably in your own timesetting.
With a 3 day cap, missing a day shouldn’t present a problem unless you are running without that buffer in your games.
And I think this is where it becomes difficult for some who are in the habit of only playing at the last minute. There’s no room for slippage then.
I quite like @nutpen 's idea of a slightly higher cap to allow for these things. But extending the increment would be annoying since that slows the whole game down more I think.
I don’t see the problem with people needing to understand that +12 means two moves a day are expected, +8 means three, +6 four moves, etc. If you are thinking of joining and playing less than that then I’d suggest thinking twice!
To me there is no shortage of slow tournaments (1 move/day or less) to join if you can’t manage 3 or 4 moves/day.
[Edit: I suppose I should add that I do find it a bit annoying when the cap is higher and people play say 6 moves, reach the cap, then do nothing until they are down to 12 hours or so, play however many moves to get to the cap again, then nothing for days, etc. I can see that’s ok within the time settings but it doesn’t feel in the spirit of fast play]
I think, this is a good point. What I like most about the +8 hours tournaments is, that you can finish them within 2-3 months (per round). I usually take part in one of the RR tournaments, when I see enough time in my schedule. However, the story is different for the title tournament, which lasts at least 8 months (with current settings). Here, I would really appreciate a little more generous buffer. I don’t want to prolong the tournament by much, but maybe the time settings could be a bit more convenient, while maintaining a good pace of play.
What would then be a success measure? i.e. in how much time do us fast correspondence players expect to end our games? I once thought about 30 days, but that looks very though in practice. Is 3 months still a good compromise?
I ask myself this question because I think it would be nice to have a clear understanding of our expectations in order to address all the different problems accordingly. Meaning, for example:
Is it feasible to achieve the desired pace between players with very different timezones?
Is it desirable to increase the 8h increment?
Is there a time control that can deal with the “opponent responding too fast” problem without getting us out of the desired pace?
I don’t understand your argument. 14 stones/week just forces you to play… 14 stones/week. If you want 2 days off you can catch up by playing faster the 5 other days. And I don’t see why different timezones could be problematic.
I don’t exactly know why but Canadian timed correspondence games I think have more time outs. Just my anecdotal observation from the couple of tournaments I’ve been in. I also think this has been discussed (maybe in the thread) before.
I think the problem is that you are at more at the mercy of your opponent. If they play erratically and you don’t check in at the right times then you can lose too much of your clock. And if you find yourself with idk 3 moves to make in 24 hours but your opponent’s play schedule doesn’t fit with yours then you can easily time out.
Found it! 8 survivers out of 44 with 12 stones in 3 days
Rather faster than your suggestions @jlt so you could be on to something! (Although I might prefer to try 21/week for a 3/day expectation like +8h Fischer)
The issue with Canadian is that each bunch of moves works as a whole.
If you manage that in advance, you could actually say “I’m gonna play 12 moves very fast, so I can use the remaining time for the last 2 moves in that bunch”.
So it’s easy to exploit free time when your bunch of moves is nearly finished.
But on reverse, if you had to take your free time when the bunch was still full, then you have to play all of your moves in the remaining time.
Which means that you have no elasticity until you finish that bunch.
This was very stressful for me, but that was a very extreme setting. My pauses where due to daily sleeping time and “who plays last move before going to sleep” was crucial.
Actually timezones probably helped a little: I was spending many hours of my clock while sleeping, because my opponent was awake at that time and played immediately… but the same happened to him at a different time!
So probably it would be worse finding a less sleeping opponent in your same timezone: the clock would tick every night just for one player!
Anyway my feeling is that Fisher is more relaxing, since you can easily understand how much each move affects your remaining time.
Hi again! I’m going to create next year’s title tournament around november the 1st. If everyone agrees, I’ll reproduce the same settings. Any suggestions for improvement?
Fisher 2d + 12h per move. If one player is quick as a bot, the other must play two moves a day to keep his time full.
Six players: five simultaneous games. It’s a small tournament Start when full.
Automatic handicap. No-one likes to crush weaker players nor to be crushed by stronger. Only SDK.
You can find it here:
It’s my first tournament!
(the first I ever made)
BTW there are two full round Robin tournaments in the group waiting to start.
One will start in few hours, the other will take some days. If I was one of those players I’d like to start immediately.
Maybe it’s just me!
Start when full.
Sofiam:dolphin: vs マンジュリカ