Average time per move.

How accurate is yours?
Mine reads 5 hours 56 minutes when in fact its 1 hour 15 minutes. If you divide hours since joining by moves made... I have checked about a dozen other members and have found only 2 to be accurate.
My math is sound
Just a minor issue.

mine reads about 4 hours a move but when I did my math i got about 1.6 hours per move

Think of it as a measure of how long you made your opponents wait.

If you have 10 games where the status is "My Move" then 10 opponents are waiting.  Each second that passes counts as 10 in your total time.

It is practically impossible for anyone to manually calculate.

I just checked my friends account. He's played 6 games since Dec 28th 2007 and his average time per move is apparently 47 minutes... There just something funny going on with the way its calculated. Something to do with time logged in/logged out perhaps? - Being logged in has nothing to do with how long you take to move on average does it? I wonder if the staff know about it but there are other more important site issues at hand currently. hmm

TadDude wrote:

Think of it as a measure of how long you made your opponents wait.

If you have 10 games where the status is "My Move" then 10 opponents are waiting.  Each second that passes counts as 10 in your total time.

It is practically impossible for anyone to manually calculate.

You could be right there. That didn't cross my mind to be frank.
That's not really time per move then is it?

lithium11 wrote:

TadDude wrote:

Think of it as a measure of how long you made your opponents wait.

If you have 10 games where the status is "My Move" then 10 opponents are waiting.  Each second that passes counts as 10 in your total time.

It is practically impossible for anyone to manually calculate.

You could be right there. That didn't cross my mind to be frank.
That's not really time per move then is it?

 It depends how your mind works. I can see how you can think that "time per move" would be simply the total amount of time you have been a member divided by the number of moves you have made. But it would never cross my mind that this would be a useful measure. It is quite obvious to me that it relates to how long on average you take to make a move which is different of course. So imagine you're a member for an hour and in that time you play 5 games; further imagine that you opponent moves instantanously but that you take 15 minutes to make your move. In that hour you make 4 moves in each game. Then your average time per move will be 15 minutes even though you have made 20 moves in an hour. Actually, if you make a move every 15 minutes and you are playing 1000 games simultaneously (as one guy on chess.com is) then (assuming that you still make a move every 15 mins in each game) you have now made 1000x4=4000 moves in the hour, but your average move time is still 15 minutes. The way you would calculate it then the avaerge move time would depend upon how many simultaneous games you are playing whereas the way it is calculated it is independent of how many games you are playing. This is more useful - when someone challenges you and you see that their average move time is 1 hour then you know that on average he or she will keep you waiting for about an hour per move.  It's the only definition that makes sense. Hope this helps.

so the average time per move is actually the average time to move per game not the average time to move per move

I may be wrong, cuz I'm not a staff member here, but I believe the time/move average is based on a clock that starts when your opponent clicks "submit move" and ends when you do likewise.  All moves in all games would be averaged, I would imagine.  So if you log off, and your opponent makes a move, your clock has now started ticking, and will continue to tick until you sign on and make a move.  That move thus took you hours or days to make and will be averaged in with all the moves you made in only seconds or minutes while both of you were online.

@ swestland

Thanks, it sounds obvious when you explain it. Just a little more complex than I anticipated. Solved I think

Ave. time per move (per game)
Indeed the stat doesn't really matter otherwise apart from measuring how active you are on average. Thanks for your replies.

The stat DOES matter because you can not enter some fast tournaments if your average time per move is too high.

Because it takes into account ALL moves made during your lifetime here it is slow to adapt if you after a few years of playing slowly want to play faster games. A pity really, it should look more to your current average than to your lifetime average...