Enforcing Tournament Conditions

Someone would have to be insane to play at anything less than 24 hours without vacation time.

Time controls below 24h would probably go horribly wrong, I can explain it further if needed. But forcing, for example, 3 moves per day wouldn't be a bad idea for that type of tournament.

I don't think 12-hour time controls are practical at all and the other suggestions of a minimum amount of moves in a given period will just end up being too complex and with too many exceptions to be useful. 

I would advise you to not enter tournaments that allow vacations, but other than that I really think you're asking for something that just isn't suitable for correspondence chess. 

I'd be interested to know if any other chess site offers the time controls you're looking for, but I doubt it. 

Hell, if someone has to make moves at the speed of light just go to live chess and have a good time.

I hardly think 12 hours equates to live chess. Nor have I ever suggested in this thread that I was expecting people to make moves every 3 hours.

You know what I don't think you could find ten players willing to play 12 hours/no vacation.

I'm just saying that 12 hours is kind of in a no-man's land between blitz and correspondence and just not a practical format. What if the tournament starts while I'm sleeping? The next day I wake up, go to work etc. and by the time I'm home I've lost 10 games. If you're sitting by the computer all day or you always have an hour where you can make those 10 moves then I'm sure you're fine. But you would have to ALWAYS be able to make moves at least every twelve hours and real life would get in the way for a lot of us. 

+1

Well, fast time controls are not for you guys. But that doesn't mean they are not perfectly OK for some.

I wish Oz well in his efforts to run fast tournaments.

Oh, I play plenty of fast games. I don't like playing 24+ hour games, but it's either that or blitz. If I had the discipline to play a 2 hour game online I would, but to focus on a single game for that long I need to have my opponent in front of me. 

Johnyoudell, I don't think it's fair to dismiss our concerns as us just not having a preference for fast games when I think there's been a lot of constructive discussion in this thread. 

I don't think he is, and certainly I'm not trying to either. "Very Fast Play" isn't for everyone, that's for sure. A 12-hour time control likewise wouldn't be for everyone either.

What I do think is an issue, is for those players that would like it, they can't get it here on chess.com , because TD's are impotent, and a 12-hour time control isn't an available tournament option.

Either or would allow for chess.com to cater to another segment of the chess play community.

I think the whole "TD power" issue is totally unrelated to this. If chess.com gave TDs more power it would surely not be for the purpose of enabling the type of tournament you're trying to set up. If they wanted to type of time control they would just set it up. 

You might want to petition the staff and try to get this type of time control enabled. Maybe set up a poll to test the waters. I still doubt anything would come of it. 

There are some other things I would like to see, though. The ability for TDs to advance a tournament to the next round if none of the active games can affect the outcome would be a nice addition. 

EDIT: Oz, chess.com has set the lowest time control in correspondece chess to 24-hours and you want to be able to play 12-hours. How do you feel about 6, 3, 2 or even 1 hour per move?

Me personally? I wouldn't be playing anything less than 12 hour time control. Since I never sleep more than 6 or 7 hours, 12 hour time control is plenty of time for me to make some moves before bed, and again when I wake up.

6, and especially 3, 2 and 1 would be untenable for me. That said, I think the site should offer it, if there's people interested in it, then more power to them.

A 12 hr/move might be a little tricky in a 24 hour world.

12 hours per move is insane.  I don't log on every 12 hours.  I'm lucky if I can log on once per day.  I have a job and other responsibilities, and can't prioritize chess such that I can drop everything else in order to make a move in a tournament.  It's not that I am taking 24 hours to think.  Usually, I only spend 3 to 5 minutes for a move; if the other person is online at the same time, we often make 4 or 5 consecutive moves each if I happen to be online for half an hour.  However, I often am not able to log on for 2 or 3 days.  If I am traveling on business, I may not be able to log on for 4 or 5 days.  That's why i stick to 2 day and 3 day correspondence chess.  For a 2 day tournament, the other player typically does not move for at least 24 hours, effectively giving me an average of 3 days to move.  The 3 day tournaments give me about 4 to 4.5 days between moves.  There is still a risk that I don't log in on time before my time runs out, but it's better that 1 day where I am more than likely to lose every game by timing out.

If you are planning a tournament (even with 1 day time controls), you need to factor in at least 2 months (probably 3 months) for the slowest games to conclude.  That's just the reality.  Even if a player wants to play fast, if the opponents are in different time zones (e.g., US and China are 12 hours apart), it is likely that there is a minimum of 12 hours between moves because the player who is not moving is likely asleep.

The only people who would be willing to play in a tournament of that format are students or people without jobs (or people with very undemanding jobs).  Even on the weekends, I could not possibly stay glued to my computer waiting for a chess move.  Moreover, sometimes I am on a plane for 10 hours in a row (16+ hours when I used to travel to Asia frequently).

More than 1 move per day is unrealistic if the opponents are in time zones that are 12 hours apart.  It is likely that one player is sleeping when the other player moves, and vice versa.  If my opponent consistently moves at 4 am my time, I am not going to stay awake or wake up early just so that we can make a few moves in the same day.

I have a very demanding job, I haven't been a student in decades, and would have no issue meeting a 12-hour time control. So let's reduce the assumptions a tad, eh?

More to the point though, why do so many people on this site seem to have an issue with people playing under those conditions?

I have to say, I'm really surprised by some of the comments I've seen here on these boards. 

If 12-hour time control were configured, then the solution for those people who didn't want to play under those conditions would be so simple, that it doesn't even warrant mentioning.

I'd be really interested to read why a 12-hour time control option hasn't been implemented by this site, and/or a good argument against it, because some 100 comments in now, I haven't heard either yet.

I don't think assuming that a 12-hour time control will be impossible for most people is unreasonable. You understand that a 6-hour time control would usually mean that whoever falls asleep loses and with a 12-hour time control the same thing applies, just less severely. 

Now, you asked for good arguments against implementing a 12-hour time control:

1. Lots of time-outs. It's easy to just say "if people time out, they time out", but of course Chess.com would like to keep time outs to a minimum. Time outs make the ratings less accurate and are also not very satisfying to the people who actually want to play. Saying that this time control would just be used by the people who want to use it wouldn't change the fact that time outs would be a lot more frequent, people forget their games or life gets in the way.

2. More time controls mean less games on each time control. Probably not a big issue, but I have noticed that getting a game will sometimes take while and as far as I know this gets worse with higher ratings. 

3. Demand. This is probably the biggest problem. You're asking for arguments against implementing this, but I haven't seen more than a handful players who have asked for this and they have all been in this thread. I don't know how much work implementation would entail for staff or if they have any other plans for what they want to do with time controls, but unless there is shown to be an actual demand for this type of time control it's kind of a pointless discussion.