The Official Chess Clock Cheated Me

I've been playing chess tournaments a long time. I've seen quite a lot. I've seen players sweep pieces from the board and storm out. I've seen fits and cursing at the board. I've seen all manner of rules disputes, and I've seen clock malfunctions (low battery, analog clock confusion, button not fully depressed), but I've never experience anything like the following: the official DGT 3000 match clock SUBTRACTED 10 seconds from my time in a time scramble, causing me to lose on time.

This fiasco happened in a five game match I played against chess expert Andrew Duren. This was the third game after I had blundered a horrific checkmate from a winning position in the second game. I got a terrible position in the opening after I tried to mix it up against the London System, and I could easily have lost in the opening. Then we went into an endgame where I was down a pawn, but I had promising play with an active king and a passed d-pawn.

The endgame went my way, and I was actually quite happy with my play in the rook endgame. Sacrifices like 40...g4! and 47...c4! paved the way for my king to invade, and I was just about to promote my d-pawn when I looked over, and I saw that my opponent had flagged. I called the flag, BUT I had 0:00 on my clock as well. You can see the final moments from the official stream from the Columbia Chess Club.

After discussion and a review of the tape, the game was ruled a draw due to US Chess rules. Per US Chess, a player cannot win on time with no time on their clock, regardless of who flags first - in this case Andrew per the clock's indicator.

I moved on to the next game, but since I hadn't recorded the final moves, I downloaded the stream archive to review later. The file sat on my desktop for three weeks before I got back to it, and I noticed something odd...

THE CHESS CLOCK HAD SUBTRACTED 10 SECONDS FROM MY TIME. 😲😲😲

I was stunned. How could this happen?! I had 12 seconds, but when my opponent pressed my clock, it took ten seconds off, landing me at 2 seconds - after those two seconds passed, I flagged.

I sent the video to the organizers who reviewed it, pulled the clock and reproduced the bug! With some odd settings with added time controls with no time, the clock SHOULD work normally, but when it kicks over to the other time control, it subtracts 2X the increment (here, five seconds). The organizers submitted the error to US Chess, and the result was updated, and I got a full point and eight rating points back.