proposed daily game time control

The present time control on daily games is that each move has a certain time limit, independent of other moves. So if you have a 1-day limit, then each move must be completed within 24 hours of your opponent's last move. This leads to situations such as carrying my phone on a camping trip, hiking with it in my hand, hoping to get a 2-bar connection so I can move before the deadline.... sad.

Given this, there's a tendency for tournament organizers to set a higher limit, for example 3 days, so when weekend plans come up, you don't need to worry about flagging. That's nice, but then there's always players who will use nearly the full time every move, and as a result these tournaments can easily drag on for over a year, even two, since each round must wait for the completion of the slowest game in that round before the next round can begin.

There's actually a motivation for players to let things drag on. If they play slowly enough, they increase chances their opponents will flag due to other events getting in the way of their moves. And also slow players are more likely to get draw offers from other players who have already locked up their chances at advancing to the next round. This is unfair to players who moved quickly and didn't get these draw offers.

What would be better was a time control that allowed for players to take more time when they needed it, but required them to stick to a more timely schedule on average, to keep the games moving.
What I propose is the following:

1. daily games have a starting time: for example 3 days = 72 hours.
2. they have a move increment, for example 24 hours, which applies after moves.
3. they have a maximum time available, which would probably be the starting time, so for example 3 days.

Here's an example for start time = max time = 3 days, increment = 1 day.

1. when the game starts, I have 72 hours.
2. I take 20 hours to complete my move, dropping the time down to 52 hours.
3. I get a 24 hour increment. 52 + 24 > 72 so I now have 72 hours to make my next move.
4. I'm away for the weekend, and this moves takes me 56 hours. I have 16 hours left.
5. I get the increment, and I'm at 40 hours. This is < 72 hours, so it stands.
6. My next move I made in 1 hour, so I'm down to 39 hours.
7. I get an increment, and I'm now up to 63 hours.
8. My next move is in 8 hours, leaving 55 hours.
9. I get the 24 hour increment, but 79 > 72, so I'm back to 72 hours.

The result of this is if I want the relaxed time constraint on the weekend, I need to move quickly during the week. In the long-run, I need to average 1 move per day. This would keep games moving and avoiding the situation where one player holds the event up for months.

An example for a quicker tournament might be 24 hours, 12 hours, requiring players to average around 2 moves per day. That's plenty of time to get thru the night if your opponent times their moves just as you go to sleep.

This proposal would require two parameters on the set-up screen:

1. max time per move
2. incremental time per move

If I was organizing a tournament, I'd set these to (1) 3 days ,and (2) 12 hours. So players would need to average 2 moves per day. It is common for tournaments to filter riders based on what their historical average move time is, but nothing at present to enforce an average move time in the present tournament. This would fix that.
If organizers wanted status quo, they could just set max time to whatever, and incremental time equal to the max time.

Sounds interesting

very good idea!

I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time. It spoils the tournament when some players will take the full time for each move regardless of the move’s complexity. I’ve seen this behavior even in the first few moves of a new game! I also see some players who have one hundred+ active games. Usually that have low ratings even if they have played for years.

I have joined a tournament a few days ago, now waiting for it to reach the player limit. One registered player has over 400 active games going! He always uses his maximum time. This will ruin the tournament so I will withdraw from it.

Please chess.com address this issue! As has been said this behavior can stretch a tournament for years. I know as I still have a tournament which I played in still active since 2021. This is ridiculous.

You are playing Daily time controls. If you are playing Daily you should not be concerned with how long other players take to make their moves. This is like playing Bullet 1+0 or 1+1 and be bothered by your opponents moving way too quickly.