In a game black usually has some time to play their first move which doesn’t count towards their main time. I generally have no issue with the fact that this doesn’t apply to white. However, for correspondence games, specifically those in a tournament, I think this should apply to white as well.
For correspondence games outside of tournaments, if white is taking too long to make their first move then black can just cancel without consequence. For games that are a part of a tournament, this of course will have a consequence. Currently I’m in a tournament with a person who is timing out of all their games. For games where they were black the games ended after three days because they failed to play their first move. In the games where they are white, it’s been almost three weeks and the game won’t end for another week.
I suspect the reason I gave for the first move timer for white is very different to the reason black is given such a timer, but I still think it is a good idea. I don’t think it’s necessary outside of tournaments either. If this is implemented it won’t stop all timeouts and it won’t mitigate the damage from all timeouts, but it will mitigate some of the annoyances caused by one category of timeouts. I don’t think this would place an unfair burden on white either.
I thought people who timed out of a correspondence tournament were booted out of the tournament. I suggest asking the tournament director to disqualify the escaper.
I’m not sure if thats offtopic now or not, but I just wanted to create a post saying that,
In a game black usually has some time to play their first move which doesn’t count towards their main time. I generally have no issue with the fact that this doesn’t apply to white.
the fact that this doesn’t apply to white can be really annoying for real time tournaments too.
For example white is on the board, black not, white is waiting for like 3 minutes and suddenly black plays a move. Of course white is not staring at the screen the whole time and it can happen that whites notices the first move after 30 seconds or a minute. Thats not too much, but still a bit unfair if you consider the luxus black has.
Or, the tornaments new round starts, black is on the board instantly, plays their move and white didn’t notice that the round started and they need 2-3 minutes. That actually happens quite a lot. White is always in disadventage. It would be nice if white had a timer too.
Thanks a lot for commenting this. I started playing a lot on OGS again a month ago, and I was actually about to start a topic on this very issue.
It can be an issue for real time ranked games too.
The issue is that while the OGS solution is pragmatic it is also asymmetric and putting a readiness tax on White.
This is especially an issue for Blitz games where the base time is something like 30 seconds.
Afaik the way lichess.org handles this, is that they give each player 30 seconds for their first move and if either player fails to take action the game is aborted. I like this approach because it does not penalize one side more than the other. The game doesn’t start until both players engage.