3 hour average

No vacation. That is a suggestion that could be beneficial, especially now that timeouts have no lasting significance.

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/tournaments/survey-vacation-or-no-vacation-official-tournaments

No vacation would seem to make sense for the tournaments that are specifically tailored to impatient people, especially when the start-up date is known in advance.  No one should be caught by surprise.

But the problem with no vacation in other tournaments is for many of them you never know when they will start up, and for all of them, if you are finished with your games in one round and you are advancing, you never know when the next round is going to start up.  A no vacation specification requires an advancing player to be ready to respond continuously, possibly for weeks or months, even when they don't have any active games going in the tournament.  At least the premium players can avoid that with the auto-vacation kick-in.

The players are complaining. "In the 1201-1400 tier, ...  In the comments there are already complaints of opponents on vacation." They prefer these opponents not enter the tournament.

By implementing the No Vacation setting in the current Quick Knockouts and dropping the 3 hour time per move restriction at the same time everyone is happy. The beauty of this is nobody is excluded. They will make the decision to not enter on their own. 

I thought the time per move was calculated by how many moves you make a day. Now I see that I'm wrong. If I make 24 moves a day, I think my time per move should be 1 hour, irrespective of what time somebody woke up or went to bed.

If you made 24 moves per day, all in the same game, your average time per move would be at most once per hour.  It might be considerably less, too, if it was your opponent's turn most of the time and you always responded within a minute or two after each of his moves.  The clock measuring your response time starts the instant your opponent's move is made.  If you happen to be online, see the move, and respond immediately, you'll have a response time of only a minute or two for that move.  If you've left a conditional move that is triggered, your response time for that move is zero.

If this is your first and only game, and these are the only 24 moves on that game, (and you made them all within 24 hours), AND you made your 1st move 1 hour after your opponent moved ... then your average time per move would be 1 hour.

However, since time per move is the average over ALL of your turn-based games: if your average BEFORE these moves was 2 hours, and you had made a total of 1000 moves previously, then your new average should be

   (1000 X 2 + 24 x 1) / 1024 = 1 hour 58½ minutes.

I agree.  If the idea is to get the tournaments to move faster, I can hardly see why the 3 hour average restriction is present if they're going to allow the use of vacation mode.

Again, 1 hour per move is the maximum your average could be in that situation, and then only if your opponent was not using any time for his moves.  Your average time would be

(24 hours - your opponent's total time for his 24 moves)/24

OK, just for fun and giggles, let's see what's required for me to get my average down to below 3 hours per move so I'm eligible for the knockout tournaments.  I'm a very "slow" player.  Including my current games I've made a total of 2960 moves, and my current average time per move is 16h44m , which I'll express as 1004 minutes per move.  Let's say I want to find out how many moves I'll have to make (Z) at a rate of 1 move per minute to bring down my average to become legal for the tournament (179 minutes per move).

Using your equation I get

((2960 x 1004) + (Z x 1)) / (2960 + Z) = 179

which solves to about Z = 13719 moves, which, if we say my average game is 30 moves, is about 458 games.  

That means to become legal for the knockout tournaments, I'd have to play my next 458 games at an average of 1 minute per move.    Ain't gonna happen no matter how much I change my playing style!  At a more feasible rate of 60 minutes per move it would take 20522 moves (684 games) to bring the average down to 179 minutes per move.

Thus, beyond a certain point, using people's lifetime average time per move becomes essentially a lifetime ban from quick tournaments, even if the person has since "reformed" and played fast games for quite a while.

You make a compelling case!

That's a pretty awesome argument, I think.  Is there any chance that requirements for future tournaments will be changed?

Again, the easy answer to this is to use a players last 100 games for calculating the average. That way, it's ensured that the average rate is "smooth" and demonstrates consistent performance. 

90 days is how far back they go to determine your timeout percentage.  Average time per move has always been your complete game history, unless it has just recently been changed.

Let me share what I have done to lower my average time/move. It has worked very well:

- Use conditional moves often. This is like answering in less than a second.

- Go through your game and answer in those were moves are simple: Often played opening lines, pre-thought moves, ending games with evident moves, etc.; then spend your time in the tough ones.

- And as previously said, take advantage of users that are online when you are online.

 There is something wrong with the math. I have made over 100 moves per day for the last few days and my time per move gets longer and longer. Seems to me it should be getting much shorter.

I would like to ask a staff member to check the computer log for my account and explain the math to me. Thanx

Remember that they are tracking the average amount of time for a move in each game.  From the stats I see for you, that could be right.  Just now, your stats show you have 128 games going and an average move rate of 3h 12m.  Let's assume your opponents always respond immediately so your clock starts running again right after each of your moves.  If you make one move in each game each day, that's 128 total moves, but clearly your current move rate per game would be 24 hours per move, which when added in to your 3.2h/move lifetime rate would increase that value to a longer period.  In order to maintain your current average, you would have to making between 7 and 8 moves per day in every game, or 850 to 1000 total moves per day.  Again, that's assuming immediate responses by your opponents, which is not realistic, but they may still respond within a couple hours or so, which will not change the math much.

Try conditional moves -- they really do lower your average move rate.

And try to log in more than once per day too, you can cut off big chunks.

'But the issue should really be addressed, new playing habits should have greater weight than old ones.