on Jan. 25 I was playing a game and it came down to an end game where the only way to win was if the opponent made a mistake or fell into a  trap.  But I noticed he had very little time left whereas I had considerable time left.  I figured I could win by letting him run out of time.  His moves were not coming back quick but I was moving almost as fast as I saw his move.  I noticed my time kept getting closer to his and his was hardly moving even when he was thimking.  Eventually my time overtook his, when there was no way it should have.  We swapped out rooks and the game became a draw.  What's up with that?

It seems that lag on one of the player's connections could have caused such a time distortion. Please understand that we are working very hard to improve the connection and stability for the Live Chess so that problems such as this will not occur in the future.

At the same time, it's probably important to point out that even if chess.com's connection and yours are both rock-solid and blazingly fast, if you're playing an opponent who's connecting via dial-up (does anyone still do that?) you will still experience lag as it's the cumulative latency that determines how much correction is required.

Sorry but I've lost a good number of games thanks to this problem, and just read this now after posting my own thread about it. Not being able to gauge the time because of someone's latent time lag thanks to dial up really defeats the whole point of playing live chess. This is ridiculous.

Bear in mind that the time corrections are performed after each move, so each time it is your move again you have an accurate guage of the time remaining for each player.  I struggle to see how you could possibly have lost a game because your opponent had a slow connection.

WHAT IF U DIDNT REALIZE U WERE MOVING SLOW OR HE WAS MOVING QUICK USING PRE-MOVSE, WHILE U WEREN'T, SOMETIMES THINGS MAY JSUT MAKE U THINK THEY HAPPENED BUT THEY REALLY DIDNT SOMETIMES U MAKE YOUSELF THINK IT HAPENED, I HEARD THAT FROM A PUBLIC SPEAKER FROM MY SCHOOL

I seem to see a lot of complaining in various threads by us Canadians. A few who obviously play while under the influence. I have played people from around the world and have experienced some lag. But the experience was well worth it. Of course these problems will be rectified when the rest of the world catches up with our high speed internet. Damn the rest of the world ehh. Great site.