Mate in one queued in premove and STILL lose on time!

I was playing a bullet game and had mate in one selected as a premove. I had 1.1 seconds left. 

The move was made on my board, but the game was recorded as a loss on time. 

The site really needs to fix its clocks to show the real time left in a game.

You should switch to Chrome.

Yes, I recently experienced something like this, where premove takes 0.2 seconds instead of the usual 0.1 seconds. Maybe chess.com has been lagging recently.

Sometimes when chess.com is doing a server update or something, it lags a lot more.

"HAH HAH"

Chess happens.

Yes well if you play a bullet game, sometimes you can lose on time. 

Lag happens, I can accept that. But the game ended, I had delivered checkmate on the board, then I lost on time.

I have played chess on many sites, and I have never seen the board represent a position that did not occur on other sites.* This isn't about lag, it is about showing what is really happening. Timestamp/timeseal shows when the clock is lagging  on other sites, but it does not allow the board to show moves that have not been played. 

I am not complaining about lag, nor am I complaining about losing on time. I am complaining that the game showed checkmate, then I lost on time. If you go back to the game now, that last move, which appeared on my board, never happened. That is a flaw with this site, and to the best of my knowledge, only with this site.

Btw, on the advice of the site admins, I only use Chrome here. It doesn't always help.

____________

*Sometimes on ICC, when they relay games being played off-site, they enter the wrong moves, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Once a game ends, you can move the pieces around in any order. The game ended, your premove fired, it moves the piece on the board that showed your finished game, and it looked like you mated then lost. It's the only thing I can see that could have happened.

LIM, other sites have premove. This is not an issue on any other site.

Again, I had 1.1 seconds showing on my clock. I also had "excellent connection (very little lag)" showing, but I know that is not always accurate. The site charges .1 second per premove.  

I think premove always deducts 0.1 seconds, also--is that right?  It seems to be the case for me.  Proabably 0.1 seconds + latency.

Owl, can you explain why that doesn't happen with chess sites such as ICC, FICS, playchess.com....

Why does this problem only exist here?

Maybe this site should program like other sites then. I played checkmate, then lost on time. According to the laws of chess checkmate ends the game. You can't claim a win on time after checkmate appears on the board. It appeared on the board.

This is basic. The site needs to fix it. Other sites do not have this problem.

Hey SmyslovFan - sorry to hear about your situation - very frustrating!

Let me address how it works: 

First off, premoves take 0.1 seconds. That is what has been preferred and agreed upon by most professional players we have consulted on the topic. They prefer .1 to .0 for premove. This is also what other chess servers do.  

Secondly, internet lag STINKS :/ Unfortunately it is a part of the internet. Packets of information can take some time to travel around. We do our best to optimize everything we can on our end so that once it hits our servers it is instantaneous. 

Here is a graph of the time it takes for chess moves to arrive in the US: http://i.imgur.com/BhCDj1V.png

Everything black is worse than 2 seconds. That means about 99% of moves take less than 2 seconds to reach the server. 

And, for < 2 seconds, we give back time taken for lag. So, if you move in .5 seconds, but it takes 2 seconds to reach us, your clock will only subtract .5 seconds. But if it takes 5 seconds to reach us, then 3.5 seconds will come off your clock. 

Does that make sense? The reason we do that is that we cannot give infinite lag forgiveness to users for a few key reasons: 1. to prevent people from using intentional internet lag programs to improve their advantage. People actually have software that will intentionally "lag" their internet so they have more time to think on their clock! And 2. if someone has a really bad connection (say 5 second lag each move), and you want to play a blitz game, do you really want it to feel more like a 10 minute game? 

That's why we cap the lag at 2 seconds maximum. So, in this unfortunate case, for whatever reason on the internets, it was more than 2 seconds to reach us :/ 

That said, we are considering making a tiny tweak to this model: give everyone ONE move where they get more than 2 seconds of lag (maybe 5-10?), especially if it's a last move in the game. But then again, put yourself in the shoes of your opponent: you are playing someone who's clock is JUST about to run out. You move, and then.... wait.... wait... what's going on.... 9 seconds later they checkmate you when they only had 1 second left on their clock. Then we are going to get a bunch of complaints on the forums that "people are cheating by extending their clock at the end of their game!!" or "My opponent had 1 second on their clock but took 10 seconds to move!"

It's kind of a lose-lose situation. We get a lot of those on Chess.com :/ We lose if we over-moderate the forums. We lose if we under-moderate them. We lose if we adjust for lag. We lose if we don't adjust for lag. We lose if we serve ads. We lose if we don't serve ads. Ah the joys of running a website.... :D

Sounds reasonable to me. If it should be used near the end of the game, then one idea is to just enable it when a player has <10 seconds left or something like that.

You can always quit. I'll give you a grand for the whole damn thing.

I might be missing the real technical issue - but it seems that each move sent from the server should includ both your and your opponent's clock times, so that your browser can calibrate itself appropriately. So if you premove, it most definitely should not flag you.

I agree that this is a bug.

OK I just read Erik's explanation. So it's not a bug, it's a feature. :-)

2 seconds max. Interesting. I agree that the lagcheaters are in principle a problem. Separately, I think that a better way to address the problem of a 2 minute game seeming like a 10 minute game is to have it be a part of your formula. I think there are other places which do this, but I'm not sure.