Paul McKeown wrote:Hmmm, I can't say I'm a great fan of increments at the moment. I tend to agree with Richard Bates that they may well have advantages, but that the implications haven't been fully worked through yet.
At the Thames Valley AGM recently a motion was put forward by Surbiton's Paul Durrant to the effect that increments may be used, where both players are in agreement. It was passed in the end, with one significant amendment at my proposal, that if the playing session has been exceeded (A: "oh but that can't happen no game ever lasts that long" B: "oh yes it can, although you wouldn't know, as you advise all your players to adjourn as soon as move 30 has been reached") that the game must stop and be sent for adjudication. It was felt that in practise this is likely to happen only for games that exceeded ninety moves and more likely to happen in games that exceeded one hundred and ten moves.
I think this is a reasonable compromise for games in an evening league.
Any thoughts?
Depends what the increment is! I think an appropriate increment for an evening league would be 75 mins + 10 secs per move. A 90 move game would take 3 hours, and it would need 180 moves to get up to 3 1/2 hours. Starting at 7:30pm, that doesn't seem too bad.
I've just read the rules for the Thames Valley League on its website. Rules 14-22 cover the time limits you can use, and the ways in which you can force adjudication, adjournment, and presumably the bit about incremental time you mentioned above will find its way in there in due course. I can't understand the rationale of having 9 whole rules just to cover the time control of the game (and associated problems that derive from adjourning). Whatever your opinion on adjournments, quickplay finishes simplify the rules massively! Anyway, where does the incremental option fit within rule 16; would it become the new 16(d), with the current 16(d), 16(e) and 16(f) shunting down, and then another control coming in at 16(h) for the longer playing session? It would seem that the priority goes adjournment, quickplay, incremental (aqi). I think that the long-term future of league chess would have the preference of iq or iqa, depending on whether or not adjournments have become a long-forgotten-about memory by then. I think any experiments with incremental time controls are certainly worth doing, so it's good that another league has offered it as an option.