You must have a timeout ratio lower than 15% to play in this tournament???

Im trying to sign up for a tournament but I keep getting the same message:

You must have a timeout ratio lower than 15% to play in this tournament???

Can someone please shed some light...?

Tournament Directors can set defining limits , eg players must be within specified rating brackets  etc.   A high  rate of timeouts can completely spoil matches for the other competitors and so are not acceptable for  serious competitive play.

To try to reduce the chances of people abandoning their games by timing out, some tournament directors specify that a person's timeout ratio has to be below a particular value before they are allowed to enter.

Your timeout value for the past 90 days is given as 54%, although it looks like it should be higher-- out of 28 finished games, you allowed 18 to time out and resigned another after 1 move.  Why would a tournament director want a player with that record in his tournament?

All is not lost.  The figure only tracks your past 90 days, so if you stop timing out of games, those games will eventually drop off as negative marks.  You could also play a bunch more games without timing out to lower the contributed percentage of your timed out games, but it would take a fair number of games.

yes i see..

i've been trying to work on my speed and so playing a lot more games at a 3min setting..as you can see it hasnt been working out for me, and now this consequence.

ill have to increase my time limit.

thanks to both for the advice.

Those comments I made refer only to the online correspondence games.  That timeout ratio is tracked separately from live games.  I assumed you were asking about a correspondence tournament, but now there are also live tournaments, and I don't know if they have restrictions.

In bullet and blitz games, losing on time is not considered a negative thing (aside from the fact that it's a loss!), because it's usually someone still playing but who just ran out of time.  But a high timeout ratio for correspondence games often indicates someone who just abandons the game instead of resigning lost positions.

yes that makes a lot more sense, than punishining someone for loosing on time.

i was in the middle of a good twenty some odd games before leaving for a training excercise for a length of time with no internet connection. to make a long story short i lost all my games by the time i returned to civilization.

oh well, you live you learn, ill have to do a better job of finishing my games prior to leaving for any length of time in the future now that i know what the consequences are.

thanks for the tips bud-

A lot of chess sites (including this one) have a vacation feature that let's you put your games on hold so that you won't time out.

Just remember to put your games on vacation if you know you won't be able to get back to them.  Also, unless you've changed it, the default setting for premium members (that's you, with a paid platinum membership) is that their vacation kicks in automatically when their time gets close to running out in a game, so if you forget or can't get back to your game(s), you're still protected.  Basic (free) memberships don't have auto-vacation protection.

But there are a couple things to remember-- 1) if you get tripped onto vacation automatically because a game was about to time out, all your games are put on vacation at the same time, and they all stay on vacation until you either change back to playing status or you run out of banked vacation time; 2) even if you go on vacation, the clocks for any active games you have in no vacation tournaments will continue to run as normal.  

thats great information!

yea im a new "paying customer" just last week, so i still havent figured out everything there is to know with the added features.

still trying out all the bells and whistles!

happy with what im paying for so far...

as a matter of fact i'd say its something of a steal when you weigh benefits and added features against the membership costs-

Yeah, for platinum the cost for a month is only about 1 beer at a decent bar or 3 beers at a dive. 

well when you put it that way..you might even argue this is a way to save $$$ if it keeps you outside the BAR!