Premove

A few times now, in time trouble in a live chess game, I've made a premove, yet still lost on time. Why is this happening?

To be clear, let's say I have less than a second left, opponent to move, I make the premove, he moves, but I lose on time instead of my premove being made. And no, his move does not put me in check or in any way make my premove illegal.

Very annoying, particularly as it has happened to me two moves from a forced mate.

play a game that gives you plenty of time.., This is what i do .

campione:

this COULD be due to network latency, but i'm not sure. i haven't seen it happen to me. were you close to a second? or closer to .1 seconds?

Does it really matter? You probably would have lost anyway.

of course it matters. you should be able to premove a mate in 2 with less than .1 seconds left. 

I thought in any case pre-moves cost you .1 second.  Even when my Rybka auto plays a book move I think it costs it .1 second and at least that's how it works on ICC.

ICC and FICS have minimovetime variables that let each player agree that even premoves will take a minimum of 0.1 seconds. But, according to Erik in this thread (and who else would you believe), chess.com doesn't have this and you should be able to premove in less than 0.1 seconds.

Having said that, I have had the experience of flagging when I made a premove. In these cases I had 0.1 seconds showing on my clock.

To me it's a nonissue. I'm not going to quibble over a few tenths of a second (even if I have a forced mate).

Yeah look it's not the end of the world, but I play a bit of three-minute chess for fun and yes, tenths of a second are vital - you can win with .5 of a second left if, say, all that's left is an unstoppable passed pawn and two kings. Indeed, I've seen better players than me convert won positions from much farther out with two or three seconds left. And if both players have less than five seconds left, it's also important.

Erik yeah, last time it happened I had .1 of a second left, and my connection wasn't perfect. That could be it.

In fairness it happens extremely rarely and on a grand scale doesn't impact on me too much, I'm more curious about it than complaining about it.

When you have lag, even premoves will cost clock time. It has happened to me quite a few times.