Just for completeness, there is also the Bronstein / delay clock. Bobby Fischer wasn’t the first chess world champion to try his hand in this kind of thing!
But I doubt that it is a good fit for Go, because there seems to be such a difference between the pace in the opening and endgame, at least among strong players.
–
Ian
For me the main difference between byoyomi and Fischer (when more or less equivalent, such as 20m+5x30 and 10m+10s seem to be) is that there is more skill involved in using byoyomi effectively.
Some (often stronger) players are really skilled with byoyomi and will use various time-suji techniques to minimise byoyomi time going to waste, while Fischer time requires much less skill to get the most out of it. So in a way, byoyomi raises the skill ceiling. You could consider that a good thing, but I feel ambiguous about it because byoyomi skills are not actual go playing skills IMHO.
Another consequence of that difference between byoyomi and Fischer is that tournament games of skilled byoyomi players can last a lot longer than most games in the same round, causing delays in the tournament schedule.
With Fischer the max game duration is more predictable, so tournament delays are less of a problem. I guess that’s the main reason why Fischer is gaining popularity in amateur tournaments (at least in Europe). And it’s nice for players who participate in such tournaments when they have more opportunities to practice with Fischer in their online games on OGS.
I agree with all of this but
I think that’s right in general but it does rather depend on the settings chosen. Following EGF class A standards the minimum main time and maximum increment to just achieve the time requirement can lead to significantly longer games if the player/players are skilled at using the fischer increment. Maybe a one off but this was my experience at two tournaments, one with min main time/max increment and the other the opposite.
The only way I can think of how a game with Fischer time can take much longer than expected, is when the game has many more moves than a typical game. That is of course possible in a big fighting game where both players end up with little territory and/or games with lots of ko fighting. But I wouldn’t consider those things to be skillfull use of Fischer time, and it can happen with byoyomi as well.
Hmm, yes, they seems right on reflection!