you said:
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play correspondence games with an increment (say 1 hour at start + 1 hour increment so you pretty much play at least 8 moves each a day).
Excuse me, when are you going to sleep at such a time control?
If you are interested in playing games like that, you might want to try to find a group to play 10 min/move vote chess games, but make sure you have enough teammates to make the moves while you have to sleep!
The point is its an increment so as long as you play 10 moves in a reasonable time interval say 1 hour, you build up 9 hours of time to go rest! 2 or 3 hours probably makes more sense, basically if you play 12 (or 8) moves a day you're never in time trouble, even if the majority of the day is spent on your clock, and the worst case is games go at half that pace (3 hour increment requires 4 moves each a day dead minimum)!
Would it be possible to set up a tourney using either live or correspondence mode where players are assigned games by the tourney process and have 3 hours of total clock to finish their game (say a weeknight setup where you play from 6:00 to midnight or something).
These are all nice ideas, but you are eventually going to come up against an opponent in a time zone 12 hours removed from you, and you are never online at the same time, in that case one move per day is the fastest you can expect.
LordTC, and how are you going to build up your 9 hours of time if your opponent does not happen to be online when you want to make the moves? Are you going to wait for hours in front of your computer just in order to be there immediately when it is your move?
If you want to play quickly, and at the same time as your opponent, I suggest you best play live chess for that.
Correspondence chess such as Online Chess has the big advantage that there is no need to be online when your opponent is. You have time to analyze your moves, and you have the chance of playing with people from all over the world from any time zone. This works because the time per move is 1 day or more.
The point being you could put a tournament up with the game time indicated (i.e. Play every Wednesday at 6PM GMT) and people who couldn't play at that time slot wouldn't sign up (or if they did would forfeit their first game due to not showing up and then be dropped from the tournament).
I don't think its necessary to have every tournament be designed to cater to 12 hour time zone differences as long as when its being played is clearly posted and explained!
LordTC, you are thinking of ways to play Live Chess. For that, simply play Live Chess. Correspondence chess is different, and has great, but different advantages.
Basically Live Chess doesn't have tournament support. So I was asking for either tournaments for live chess or a way to do something that plays at a reasonable pace for tournaments using the correspondence setup.
No an increment allows you to build up additional time rather than X time per move and you lose it when you move.
If you read the previous posts I believe its fairly clear that I want the option to have much shorter times but the ability to build up a store of time by playing moves. There are a fair number of examples already posted.
Which is why the title of this thread is "Increment for Correspondence or Live Game Support". Basically correspondence has tournaments and live chess has no tournament support, so if you want to play tournaments you need to put up with the glacial pace of 1 move a day (in many cases far worse).
I think time+increment for Online Chess is a good idea. As it stands now, it's easy for players with different expectations to be matched up. For example, in a recent random matchup I picked the fastest time setting (1day/move) and was matched up against someone who played... 1 move every day. This is not abuse in any way at all, but I wanted a faster game (2+ moves/day) and thought maybe someone looking at shorter time controls would also want that. Nope. Mismatched expectations.
Time+increment would largely solve that. And it would be no more confusing than in live chess. Typical settings could allow for weekends or whatever, and still have the assurance that the game would only last for X weeks. A seek with time controls of, say, 4 days + 12 hours would not lead to mismatched expectations.
Is it possible to get more features for live chess on the server or an increment mode for correspondence?
I find I'm much more comfortable with live games because I don't have to play so many games at once. Playing tournaments can be difficult on here if you have trouble focusing on what your plans are in 12+ games at once (I ended up withdrawing from some because I didn't realize how crazy it would get and suddenly I had 50+ games to play and couldn't concentrate on any of them well enough. Even if live tournaments isn't really feasible could we at least get PGNs and the option for computer analysis from live games? Or an option to play correspondence games with an increment (say 1 hour at start + 1 hour increment so you pretty much play at least 8 moves each a day).
Basically I feel like I want to play tourneys that have at most 5 games at once but then those tournaments might take months to complete if anyone plays anywhere near the minimum number of moves!