Cel Phone Chess Clocks in Tourneys
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Not really possible to cheat with phone clocks, either player can alert suspicious vibration or pinging- not hard to see.
Club tournaments with their own ratings don’t typically have any cheating issues- we’ve used phone clocks before when we were short, no problem at all.
It's a Regional rating system that covers three states, so it's a bit bigger deal than just a club rating system.
We're considring having a protocol before each round that includes 1) make sure phone is set to vibrate or mute 2) make sure battery is above X% 3) turn up the brightness 4) make sure each player knows how to pause the clock to call a TD, without resetting it.
Also considering mandating the use of the same clock app on android, and on apple, so all players can get familiar with it in advance. Some cel phone clocks are better than others -- i.e. they might BEEEP when time elapses, or freeze completely when one side runs out of time.
Abtectous wrote:
Not really possible to cheat with phone clocks, either player can alert suspicious vibration or pinging- not hard to see.
They're presumably provided by competitors. The competitors can write their own chess clock app which mimics the official one, and then have it run slower when on their move and faster when on their opponents move.
Disallowed in US Chess rated play, but you already knew that.
Time scrambles can result in broken screens, so swapping phones between boards might be even more problematic than players using them on their own boards.
If tournaments have 50 players (25 boards) you might need only five to ten clocks to be put on the longer running games of a round (many games finish quickly before a clock becomes an issue).
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Looking for input. Starting a high school chess league, and it will be rated using our own rating system (not USCF rated). Hardly any chess clocks owned in the area, so we're allowing cel phone chess clock apps. Figure chance of cheating is slim, since both sides can see the clock. Still, what kind of cheating prevention measures might we take, if any?
Ideas we've had include A) Allow floor judges to inspect the phone before, and after, a game B) Randomly specify whose clock gets to be used, before each round (White, or Black) C) Have a random pattern of trading clocks between boards (. for Round 1, announce at start of round that Board 1 trades clock/phone with Board 2, etc) D) Keep cel phone usage forbidden for any other purpose in the playing hall.
Anyone else hold tournaments with cel phone chess clock apps, how didi it go? Any issues?