chess clock not moving

hi,

its my opponents move and his clock shows he has two days to move but its been like this for more than a week. he is not on vacation and we are 19 moves in. I have messaged him but he has not responded. any ideas as to what is going on?

cheers

If he has been going on vacation for a short period every day, he gets charged a full day of vacation.  But under the New Improved stupid rule introduced last year, he also gets the "unused" remainder of that vacation day added to his real clock, which if he's less than a day down from his original 3 days, bounces him back to a full 3 days again.  He gets to generate real clock time again and again.

Most of the summaries round down to "2 days" when they show how much time is left, so if he pulls his vacation stunt and bumps back to a full 3 days, a couple seconds later the game will show that he has 2 days left, although it's really 2 days and 23 hours.  Four hours later the game summary still show he has 2 days left, although it is now 2 days and 19 hours, etc.  He can let that get down to 2 days and 1 hour, then go on vacation for a few minutes, come off vacation, and he's back to having 3 days left (which will immediately show 2 days again).

So if you keep looking at the game status, unless you hapen to catch the couple minutes that he goes on vacation each day to reset his clock, you'll just keep seeing 2 days left.  To get around that, look under the Game Details tab, which doesn't give just the days remaining, but also the hours.  My guess is if you check every few hours you'll see a steady decrease in his time down to close to 2 days 0 hours and then it will jump back to 2 days 23 hours and start decreasing again.  Something like

2 days 21 hours
2 days 16 hours
2 days 7 hours
2 days 2 hours
2 days 22 hours (after he pops on vacation for a minute or two) 

  If so, you're seeing the New Improved vacation rule being used against you.  The good news is, sooner or later he'll run out of vacation.  How many vacation days does he have left?

Thanks for your help cystem_phailure... i think thats what he is doing... although it seems like a lot of work to go through just to buy time... he is going to lose anyway... just looked at his clock and it is now just below 2 days... any way im not going anywhere, ill continue playing my games and wait... time is on my side! thanks again

Your obsessive rantings about vacation go far beyond this particular loophole being used against jamroll.

My opponent is playing 150 games and i have sinced discovered that he is using his vacation time like this so he can "reduce his game load". I think i'll let it slide for now as I did not see his vacation message and reason for doing this as i play a lot from my iphone. I think its bending the rules a bit and I that playing 150 simultaneous games is too much. I lose track of my game plans if im playing more than 20 or so!

thanks

jamroll

Quite a few people with high numbers of games going will play around with vacation to try to balance their load, which is irksome, but it doesn't work out for them in the long run.  All they end up doing is depleting their vacation and once it's gone, they've still got just as many games left to play.

As to game plans, I keep pretty extensive notes but even so, like you, I see a difference for myself at about the 20 game mark.  Recently I was up close to 30 games, and I resigned 4 good games (2 just getting started) to cut that down a tad.  Also, my average time between moves is 5 times as high as yours so I have 5 times as long to forget what's going on!