One Change to Save Thousands of Members Months of Time

on another chess website, they've made this exact change.  at the moment they made the change, thousands of members saved months of time!  months i say!

Here's one:  both players will advance regardless of the outcome of a Q+K+P vs. K+P endgame:

http://www.chess.com/tournaments/pairings.html?id=8196&round=3

well shoot.  i made it up.

It's been said before, but why not just use a regular chess clock? Set it at G/1 month per player instead of two hours and voila! The round is guaranteed to be over within 2 months. What's so hard about that?

I'm still looking for that change that will save one member thousands of months of time.

I'm still amazed that anyone would have any time saved.  I didn't know there were CC players who just sat in front of their screens doing nothing while waiting for their opponents to move.

Which one means yes???? YEA

i want my time to be wasted.  since i kicked the drink, somebody's gotta have some fun.  yarrrrrrrr.

Wait -- I can go outside?

How can I say no -.- You are absolutely right.

DramaticExit, what you are describing is what I refer to as the 'long tail' phenomenon. It seems that if you start a tournament, even with the best of intentions and the best of pre-screening of players, you're still bound to have a couple of games taking a really long time. With a 100 person tournament, it is a virtual certainty.

So what can you do?

The site already created the No Vacation tournaments, to address exactly this idea (1). The site could implement all sorts of other time controls, some of which I think are very good ideas. In fact, having a "x moves in y days" type of time control would actually make a no vacation tournament better, in my opinion. You get 5 days for 20 moves (super quick), and if you make 20 moves in 2 days, well you get a 5 days bonus now. So you can manage your own time. But, they haven't done it yet. Honestly I don't know how much of a rearchitecture it would require, I have no idea how much work it would be. I don't know how popular it would be. I don't know how confused the general users would be with these changes. But it does address the core of the problem.

I don't think that implementing stricter policies does get at the core of the problem. Note that the only thing that is actually against the TOS is so-called vacation abuse. So you'd have a legitimate gripe there.

Lastly, perhaps what you're really interested in is Live Chess Tournaments, which apparently are coming. So if you want predictability in the finish, you'll be getting it soon.

(1) What's funny is that a No Vacation tournament almost encourages people to keep playing in lost positions, taking the maximum per move, because there's always a chance that the winning player will actually have to go on vacation. And if the losing player has to go on vacation, well, they're losing anyways, right?

Almost like there should be a warning message when you enter a 100-person tournament, that it will likely take between 12 and 18 months to finish.

Until all of the games in the group are finished, the decision about who goes through to the next round could change ... if the group leaders were banned (or withdrew).