Hello
I’m running this tournament:
I see that the player @signius has already lost two games by timeout and been disqualified from the tournament. But the time controls are 14 days + 1 day/move and the tournament has only been running for 4 days so I don’t see how he can be timing out of these games. Can anybody shed any light on this for me?
Thanks
rottenhat
There is a separate timer at the start of games. It allows a certain amount of time for Black to actually join and start.
It might be the same amount of time for all correspondence games. I don’t know.
Anyway, obviously, my guess is that signius ran foul of this timer.
I don’t know the details of this ‘start timer’ and I would very much like to know.
Nb. The ‘start timer’ that I’m referring to shows up in blue on game/home & profile page.
I’m the player who these games timed out on. I didn’t have a chance to log in and move until now. The tournament auto-started on the 1st, which I knew but thought would be okay as I knew the games had 14 days main time.
My other two games in this round, my opponents played the first move. I have approx 10 days left to move in each of these. This separate timer mentioned seems rather inconsistent with normal play. Surely the main time for the first player should start counting when an automated game begins.
While I intend to play the remaining games, I see that I have also been tagged as Disqualified already.
Yes, I have to agree - this is somewhat weird behaviour. It doesn’t make much sense to me to have such a (relatively) short window of time for the first move to be played in correspondence tournaments where the main time might easily be 30 days or more.
If I’m running a face-to-face tournament, as long as a player has checked in with me that morning, I will start their clock running at the start of the round. I don’t suddenly declare the game over after only a fraction of that player’s main time has elapsed - their opponent needs to wait for the clock to run out main time and byo-yomi to claim the win. A player should be free to use their main time however they want.
I don’t see any mention of a separate timer in the site help files (or anything about disqualification either, for that matter).
Oh well…sorry @signius, had I known this I might not have chosen to start the tournament right on New Year’s Day. My apologies.