Are Chess.com’s Time Controls Failing Beginners?

There’s a serious issue with Chess.com’s time controls for beginners.

For novices, the only realistic options are games that are Too Long (15|10) or Too Short (10|0).

In practice, one player often blitzes out moves, while the other tries to think. And the slower player can lose on time even when clearly winning.

Could Chess.com add a 15|0 option to the default rapid row? Custom time controls don’t really solve it, because almost no one uses them in the main pool.

Without a middle-ground time control, it’s hard for newer players to both enjoy the game and learn. Not everyone is aiming for either a career in chess, or to play fast games dominated by super aggressive players who ignore all theory to focus on early fried liver and queen attacks.

Many popular content creators learned as kids, so they may not notice this issue for adult beginners. Kudos to Levy for his slower 10-minute runs—they’re still fast for me, but much easier to follow.

What's your definition of 'beginner' because it might impact my response

Let's say people rated under 800.

10|0 usually results in a 10-15 minute game where the winner is usually determined by the fastest and most aggressive player. That's fine for someone who knows the game and is just playing simply for the competition. But it's not ideal for learning and improving.

And 15|10 often results in a game that takes 35 to 40 minutes. This is better but it would be nice to have an in-between option.

That could work too. But it's not one of the main options.

At under-800 it's also relatively easy to find 5+5, where if you are about to flag you can just play a random move

So general title but the problem is just a specific time control

Well I don't know what has to be specifically 15|0, but yes, there is a sweet spot, I think, for people playing and learning principaled chess who still want a rapid game.

20 0 is a minimum for beginners. Ideally, they can use 40 minutes for a "quick game" xince they tend to stare at the position trying to work out what they should be looking at.

I am also under 800 in rapid and almost all of the games at 10/0 end in a resignation or checkmate at like 5 minutes, out of my 650 rapid games only 35 opponents were flagged, I have 0 flags

But again that time format mostly helps players who want to win on time pressure versus those trying to learn the game. Adding an increment is going to help the person who blitzes out moves much more than the person who likes to think longer on each move as they are learning.

I've actually waited over a minute to get a match at that time rating, and because it is so infrequently used the players on there tend to be considerably lower ability for their rating than in the normal times. Also I don't like the increment as a solution for the same reason as I posted above: It really only helps at the end of the game to not lose immediately. But if you're just learning or not that fast it's not really going to help you against those who are just trying to cheese you on time.

Ultimately I think it comes down to whether chess.com wants to promote winning it all costs, even if beginners don't improve, or do they want to promote people to learn the game and get better? Because under 800, more than half of the people are blitzing out non-standard openings and super aggressive moves simply to win on time. And they do win, quite a bit, against players who are more deliberative, and could be faster once they are more familiar with the patterns, but aren't there yet.

These alternate time controls, requiring a separate selection to even see them, are used by such a small percentage of the chess.com users. It would be easy enough for them to show all the default time controls, or to add one or two more to the default UI.

I just don't understand the logic of rapid going from 10 minute game to a 15 plus 5. There is a big difference between those two options.