time per game sucks, you guys

It should be time per move as the standard.

Play with a small initial time and a very large increment.

Something like two minutes at start, plus thirty seconds per move.

Then the time-per-move quickly becomes dominant over the initial two minutes.

That would certainly be better than straight time per game but still not as good as straight time or move. It seems like time per game is tradition left over from the days of analog chess clocks where you had to physically turn the arms of the clock with a circular gear. It’s 2022 and we have digital clocks and computers for Christ’s sake.

Time per move makes the game way less enjoyable because you can just sacrifice a piece and your opponent can’t spend enough time to come up with the best defense so you can easily just bring in your pieces in checkmate them. Time per game makes it so the time is actually a piece and you have to use it properly. You have to know how to manage your time properly depending on the position.

Average correspondence enjoyer

Not only does time per game sucks....time sucks.

recently I've lost several games with still a couple of seconds on the clock (and NOT checkmate)....can someone explain?

Lag or bad internet connection?

If you play as much bullet as you do, get used to running out of time.

 

You don't actually have time in the clock:

https://support.chess.com/article/689-i-lost-by-timeout-but-the-game-record-shows-i-had-time-left-what-is-going-on

 

Or you got disconnected:

https://support.chess.com/article/213-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

 

I don't mind running out of time, it's part of bullit....but if there's still a couple of secs left on the clock and it says you've lost....that's frustrating

@NMRhino, shouldn’t the chosen time convention be focused on who is the best at chess over who is the best at managing time? I don’t think the standard time convention should support you making bad moves on purpose….

So many end games where either myself or my opponent or both are trading of pieces when we wouldn’t otherwise want to simply because of the time. Stupid.

It’s also interesting that the daily is in time per move. Why the contradiction? If everyone prefers time per game, why not make the daily a time back of like 1000hrs?

 

Because daily is basically correspondence and live chess is essentially played like OTB chess, which doesn't use a time per move metric.

 

Imagine a scenario where your physical national examinations work that way. You are given several easy questions (which normally take you one or two minutes to complete) and several challenging questions (which have more marks and take you ten minutes). And imagine that you have only five minutes per question - literally five minutes for every question, not an average of five minutes.

 

Or even better: a construction project for a tall building.

 

Imagine what happens if the workers are given

- only one day to put a fixed part, regardless of the difficulty; it will likely result in sloppy work which results in a serious structural problem for the building

- one month to put a fixed part; this would be better, but if the workers choose to perform the work "last minute", think of the number of years it would take to finish the building.

 

So in other words, this might be worth considering, but then

 

- if we are given too little time per move, we will not be able to make good moves

- if we are given too much time per move, your opponent could well wait until the last few moments of each move (as is the case for some Daily games) and this game could drag very long

 

In real life, we do not always have the luxury of time. This is especially true for those in the production line. Just as much as perfection would be desirable, a delay in a stage of production will result in a cascade of the delays and this could push back the roll out of the final product by months or even years.

@martin_stahl, thanks for the explanation. You get the points I’m making, right?

@eric0022, I think the points you’re trying to make are a stretch. We’re talking about a game here. It doesn’t take any more time to pick up the piece with your hand and move it from the beginning to the end. It kind of applies considering the early and end game moves don’t require as much thinking as in the middle but that’s really really different from bubbling a multiple choice answer vs writing a 1page essay and from hammering a nail vs building a skyscraper. Very very different. Nice try, though. A for effort.

The criticisms in your second post also apply to time per game. If you start running out of time in a time per game you’ll also make bad moves. Someone who was moving fast could drag the game out in a time per game as well by being sure to sit there and think using up all their time.

It would be better if we risked someone taking the maximum amount of time but the time convention supports the ‘who is the best at chess’ proposition, than to make it more about time management and less about who is the best at chess simply to prevent someone from dragging things out.