Old Thread: IMPORTANT Change Coming to Vacation Use!

Amen!

it isn't false. we take the 24 hours off AFTER you come off of vacation. so, if you have 10 minutes left and you go on vacation for 5 minutes, it will try to take 24 hours off but you will only have 10 minutes, so it will take off all of your remaining 10 minutes of vacation. 

So vacations will now be a minimum of 1 day OR all your remaining vacation time, whichever is less.

Given that "minimum" confused some people, that phrasing will probably cause people some grief too.

At my company I can borrow vacation time - I can go negative.

But I must get approval for that sort of thing.

???

I have no idea what you're talking about.

The elephant must have gotten lost in the mail.

but eric iam a droid and i dont get what u mean

bsrasmus, I would go even further and say that there are a fair number of people out there who would be astonished that there are people who think that there could be such a thing as "vacation abuse".

If I understand the people talking about "vacation abuse" correctly, their main objective is to encourage others to play many moves in their games swiftly. The situation described in my scenario above is about someone who would be trying to do exactly that, but he would be slowed down by the new vacation rule.

If I understand one intention of the new rule correctly, it is to keep people from being essentially on vacation for one losing game while playing their other games normally. The consequence of this new rule may very well simply be that people who do want to draw out their losing game will take to slowing down in their normal games, making their moves only about once per day. So in that case, the new rule will not keep people from using vacation for prolonging lost games, the only effect of the new rule will be to slow down all the normal games.

bsrasmus, I think you are misunderstanding me, or at least pretending to do so. So I will start to be a lot clearer:

I hold the view that there is no such thing as vacation abuse.

1) The chess.com time controls have a regular time rhythm for normal moves, giving you enough time to come by here and make a move if you know what your move will be, or if you do not need to analyze much for this move.

In chess, in critical positions, much more analysis time is needed for some moves than for normal moves. In real correspondence games, one can save up some time for such cases by making some of your other moves more quickly. (This is why in such time-control formats, people are using their thinking time best if they make their normal moves quickly. In the chess.com time controls, the inbuilt best strategy to use the allotted time is to make normal moves as slowly as possible, especially when the following moves turn out to need analysis.) In some Online Chess formats, such additional time is provided for under names such as "timebank".

The only thing on chess.com that at least in an indirect way could take over the function of such "additional analysis time for difficult game stages" is vacation time. Very often, the game stage requiring the most analysis and fighting is when you notice that your position is starting to become worse.

2) Some people misinterpret Online Chess in that they think that it should be a lot like over-the-board chess, and that one should make moves very quickly and very often. Let us call them "impatient users". Normal chess players know about the importance of making fair use of the time allowed to you by the time control, and they know about the value of having more time to analyze a position.

My impression is that it is mostly "impatient users" who complain about somebody who is doing nothing else than using the time allowed to him by the time control or taking the vacation time he is perfectly entitled to.

3) Drawing out a hopelessly losing game can be done much more efficiently by fully using the time allowed by the time control than by sacrificing vacation time. This is why vacation time is the smallest part of this kind of problem.

4) The thought of playing a correspondence chess game without any vacation time allowed has been very strange to me ever since "no vacation tournaments" have been introduced here. The reason for this has been mentioned many times in the forums: People do have lives besides chess, you know.

I appreciate that chess.com is really great, and that many people are probably right to call it addictive in one or the other way, but hey, let people have and use their vacation time! Your chess games are not running away, they are safely stored on chess.com's servers to be continued when both players have time for them

How could a concept so simple become so tangled?

Ah yeah.... chess players.

ilmago,

While I agree with most of your points, there are two things where I'll disagree with you.

First, your statement that there's no such thing as vacation abuse. While you're right that using vacation time isn't the best (or only!) way for someone who is losing to draw out a losing position, in the hopes that their opponent will forget to move and time out, that's not the most common form of vacation abuse.

To me, the function that allows paid members to slip into vacation mode automatically when they're about to time out is the real vacation abuse. And even that wouldn't be bad if it wasn't abused so much. I played on opponent who had HUNDREDS of games going! He would log on, turn off vacation mode, make moves in a few of them, then slip back into vacation mode automatically, because he was down to seconds on the clock on dozens of his games. He'd repeat this several times per day. If he can't keep up with that many games, then he needs to play less games or a longer time control, not abuse the vacation coverage this way.

The change being implemented to make him run out of vacation time faster for this type of behavior will stop him from doing this, which is the point. For this, I applaud chess.com for a positive change.

The other thing that I find interesting is your point number 1. This is why I prefer to play at a rate of 5 days per move, even though I move much faster most of the time in most of my games. I'll make several moves in the same day when just banging out memorized book opening theory. But I know when I get to a critical position that requires more thought, I'll always have 4 or 5 days to think about it. If you want that extra thinking time at critical junctures, why not just play a slower time control, instead of wasting vacation time for something other than vacations?

But I see your point about the time controls here encouraging these sorts of things. Maybe we could ask Erik about adding time controls more similar to old style correspondence, ie 30 days for ALL moves, with an additional 30 days added every 10 moves. Thus, time per individual move is more flexible, allowing delays when necessary without vacation time, but the overall time for a game is similar to 3 days per move.

bsrasmus,

3 - please do make the real calculation. Even if somebody used an entire 90 day vacation reserve for such a purpose, he would use it once and "gain" no more than three months. And he would not even be costing his opponent any effort or time, because the opponent does not even have to spend time for making moves there.

Somebody who would be using simply the normal time given to him by the time control could "gain" the same kind of time just by playing out slowly the 20 or 30+ moves that still remain until mate at some kind of three day per move time control, for example. And this without wasting any of his vacation time.

4 - I do not like the idea voiced by you that an opponent of mine should be entitled to tell me where I would have to be and what I would have to do during what I consider to be my holiday from playing chess.

Of course Erik is deciding here. I know he is taking into account the advice of the users here and taking into account what he knows can be best for chess.com. If this were not the case, I would not bother taking the time to write down my advice here.

I agree with you about the auto protection, to me it's an ugly blot on the chess.com landscape. This new system will definitely improve that, it now comes at a greater cost.

The modifying of time controls, however, I don't think will work. Because of different time zones, often one player will get a huge time advantage:

Say two players have a game, their lifestyles are pretty similar, they both play on here 8pm to 10 pm their local time.

One is in London, one in New York.

The London guy moves at 10 pm, and logs off. Five hours later, the NY moves, and logs off.

In a 24 hour period, the one clock will have 19 hours, the other one 5 hours. Very soon the american will have 10, 12 extra days in his bank...

I was thinking more in terms of new control options, on top of keeping the existing ones. Thus, players would be able to play whatever option they prefer.

Fromper, I think what you are observing about players with many hundreds of simultaneous games is not mainly about their auto-vacation protection. I think the main point about these players is that they tend to use their allotted thinking time in the best way to enable them to play so many games, which is to use almost all of their time for each move. This is the main reason why they tend to move more slowly than other players, and why games with them tend to last longer than others.

If the time controls here on chess.com had a different structure, for example like the correspondence chess time controls you were mentioning, these many-games-players would need to optimize their use of time in a different way, namely by making normal moves as fast as possible, and by finishing their games as quickly as possible to make room for new games. (Of course, changing the time control structure here on chess.com would be a major change, there may arguably be many pros, but also many cons about this.)

It is interesting to see that you are choosing 5 day games as a "workaround" solution to the time-control problem we have identified. Of course such a workaround solution slows down the games even more, which is not in the interest of most users. And I think this is why the most common time-control, for example if you want to play in team matches, tends to be 3 days per move as the best working compromise for many here.

No pictures. 

I wonder if there is a stat available for how long (time-wise) 1, 3, 5, 10 day games last on average?

I suspect 5 day games won't be much longer than 3 day games. Just a suspicion, I have nothing to base this on.

rooperi, in "ancient" correspondance chess, moves which were sent off by postcard on the same day that the opponent's move had arrived, were counted as 0 days time used.

As a parallel solution, something like a 1 day per move plus some timebank would seem to be a reasonable way to approximately reproduce that. Encouraging people to move quickly within a day or so, and avoiding things like time zone imbalances as you mentioned.

No doubt.  In any large group of people there have to be those who reside on the lower end of the comprehension curve-- you know, the ones whose electronic devices flash "12:00" for years on end. 

If I want to pause my games while I am making waffles, how much vacation time will that use?

Not possible.  When someone goes on vacation, they are on vacation for all of their games simultaneously (except for any games in some designated tournaments that don't allow vacation).  There's no separate vacation time for individual games.  Each account has one vacation clock, and it's either ticking or it isn't.