is my opponent cheating the clock?

A while ago he had 11 hours remaining until his next move. He still hasn't moved, but all of a sudden he has 35 hours remaining until his next move.

Can someone please explain?

 It sounds very much as if a premium member went on vacation, for only a few minutes.

Ask him if auto-timeout protection kicked in.

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/suggestions/new-auto-vacation-rule

"This is to prevent "vacation" time being used to just manage an over-loaded games list. - but removal of 24 hours from vacation time, in turn adds 24 hours onto the game clock, hence the time difference. One day is still lost from vacation time though.".

I'm not following how that works to prevent people for using vacation time to manage an over-loaded games list -- I would think that the one day minimum alone would do this.  This seems to actually undermine that goal somewhat.  Are you saying that it's an intentional part of the design and not a bug?  If so, what's the rationale behind it?

Appears it was designed this way, so it does nothing.

I'm just struggling to see it as anything but a bug.  If it's an intentional part of the design then it's beyond me what its purpose is.  I hope it's something pretty profound, because the side effect is that it completely undermines the agreed upon time controls in CC games.

When you return from vacation - and assuming auto-timeout protection has cut in - you may only have a few minutes to move on some games. Unless the game clocks were set back a bit, would you not be virtually forced to go on vacation again - if you could not get your moves made in time?

That said, 24 hours does seem excessive as a breathing space.

Hmm, the consequences of this seem much worse than the benefit it provides.  Here's what I would suggest as a better way to address this:

Prohibit moves from being made while on vacation, but allow conditional moves to be made.  This way, a player can effectively pre-move all of his short time limit games while his vacation is on and then commit them by turning his vacation time off.  When the vacation ends, all the games in which it's the player's move will all automatically enact the pre-moves that were made.

TheGrobe, it is currently possible to enter conditional moves while being on vacation.

However, in order to enter a conditional move, it has to be the opponent's turn, and of course, in order for the conditional move to become relevant, you need to guess correctly which move (or moves) your opponent is going to make next.

So conditional moves do not allow a player to make moves in all of his games while he is on vacation.

Yes, as committing a conditional move while it's your move is no different than making a move under the current functionality.  Naturally this would need to change.

I'd proposed a consolidation of the conditional moves and analysis board (and even the game-play board) some time back that would address the inability to make conditional lines while it was your move:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/suggestions/combine-conditional-moves-and-analysis-board

I am not so sure if it would be recommendable to join the functionalities of game board, analysis board, and conditional move board. People will want to be very easily and clearly be able to tell apart whether they are analyzing, or entering conditional moves, or playing out a move in their game.

And all people who wish to make no use of the chess.com analysis board, or who do not wish to enter any conditional moves, should have a simple and clear interface window that allows them to simply play the game without having to deal with analysis options or conditional move option settings in that same window.

I personally think that it can be a nice feature to be able to enter moves in your games while you are on vacation. (This could completely remove some of the problems connected with vacation use and time management that presently exist and seem to be of completely artificial and technical nature.) Whether this will be implemented or not may mainly depend on what chess.com wishes to be the intended use of vacation time.

There are definitely pros and cons to the suggestion -- I do, however, think that there is a lot of opportunity for a more robust interface there even if you pick and choose what gets implemented.

For the issue at hand in this thread, all that would need to be done is to allow people to effectively pre-move while on vacation.  It's certainly better than the kludgy and unfair addition of game time.

I can understand that there will have been people who have been surprised that there are cases when vacation time is taken away from them which they have not used. It may have turned out to be logical and necessary to at least give them back that time in the form of game thinking time.

But I am probably not the best person to speculate on the intended sense of details of the new vacation rule, as I had strongly advised against introducing it altogether in the thread in which it was presented.

I don't think that giving that time back on games is fair to their opponents at all.  If this really was intentionally designed into the vacation usage changes, I think it was a blunder.

No, and there have been situations where it's been a real problem -- I know it happened to AWARDCHESS and he ended up in a loop of taking vacation off only to have it immediately go back on before he could make any moves due to the timeout protection.

I'm not saying the problem doesn't need to be addressed, just that adding 24 hours to the game times is a terrible way to address this problem.

What I'm suggesting I'd rather see players be given the ability to commit their moves prior to turning their vacation status off, and to have all of those moves automatically made for them, much as conditional moves are, as soon as they do.  This, in my mind, would be a much better way to address this problem without unfairly undermining the agreed upon time limits further than the vacation time already has.

I agree with that it can be a fine idea to allow moves being made during the vacation time.

However, I would add that vacation time is an important part of the agreed time limit.

If there was not any vacation time here, I would not be playing correspondence chess on this site. And I think this is the same for most people here.

The problem is that the 24 hours don't get added by me and Awarchess and other people with many games!!!

Yes, a fair point, which highlights another minor pet-peeve of mine:  Why can't we see how much vacation time players have left unless they're actually on vacation?

OOOPS, really ???? Is chess.com having special bugs affecting only players of many games, and additionally is making rules against them that are different  for normal users???

59 days here, I took last Christmas Day off, while I went on the lash.