I still think 60 + n x 20' is better than 75. I do not like single byo-yomi time. With 75m sudden death, I do not set an alarm at 60m, telling myself i need to hurry up. At 60m, what i think is I still have 15m, not I'm in a status of byo-yomi and may run into lack of time.

Sudden death is just horrible, not for serious game. I would play fun game with sudden death setting.

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长考出臭棋.

More from a theoretical background

I would prefer Brondstein or delay timing

As with standard Byoyomi and canadian byoyomi is is spilling and spilling systems are supposed to lead to a more relaxed game (If by quick playing you lose the bonustime anyway, it is hoped that players therefore will play more relaxed)

maybe a job for the rules comittee to give guidlines for minimal timing requirements using the different time systems

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

I am not sure whether I got it right what you wrote, but I think you can play in a more relaxed way if time is not spilt (because the player can accumulate an appropriate amount of time for difficult situations). Also it is fairer if it is guaranteed by the system that both players have the same amount of time available regardless of how much they have already used up. This only works if time is not spilt.

I think it needs to be stressed that time is not accumulated with Bonus time. This may seem contradictory, but I urge you to think about how the number of moves remaining and the time reserve are correlated. The accumulation is really an illusion.

Anyway, I believe that the idea to force the players to use more time through spilling is fundamentally bad. Even if one accepts the basic premise of this idea, there are many moves that are more or less automatic and do not warrant thinking for even 10 seconds. Players should generally be allowed and encouraged to use their time as they see fit.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Am i forcing players to use more time?
I hope i did not do that, but the result of delay timing is that you don't get any "profit" from it.

Are the moves that do not warrant thinking for even 10 seconds sometimes the losing move?


What do you mean?



I don't understand what you mean here.
Delay time garantees that players have the same amount of time available regardless of how much they have already used up. (they always get the bonus time for every move) the difference is that they cannot transfer unused bonus time to a later period.

Maybe i was not clear the idea is that with delay timing the bonus time is higher than with fisher timing,because it is spilling. (Did i forget to mention this )

I think that one of te reasons for the introduction of delay timing in chess was that players always had time to write down the move on their gamesheet.


The background to my reply was the Shodan Go Bet [http://dcook.org/gobet/details.html] where the timing system that is used is Fischer time control. 40 mins + 20 secs/move
I think this is quite in favour of the computer, in the first F moves the computer will hardly use any time (the moves are just picked out of the opening or joseki book) and so the computer has F x 19 seconds extra time for when the middle game starts.

I think for the human (John Tromp) a delay time control of 40 mins + 30 secs/move would give a beter game.

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

This is logically false.

The computer will have F x X seconds extra, where X is the average time per move of John Tromp minus the average time per move of the computer.

Moves that do not warrant thinking time are, for example:

• Taking back a ko when your opponent has responded to your ko threat.
• Responding to ko threats that are obviously large enough.
• Playing out the moves of a squeeze that you have decided to play
• Playing out standard sequences (e.g. hane and connect endgame)

With such moves, if they are playing with 30 seconds delay, then you're effectively forcing players to use 28 seconds on reading other things if they want to use their time optimally. Which is annoying, IMO.

Did i made an error again?

Suppose

Opening is 20 moves (40 stones)

The Computer is using his opening book uses only 1 second per move

Using Fischer time control. 40 mins + 20 secs/move

The computer has after the opening 40mins + 20 x 19 secs(unused fisher time) = 40 mins + 380 secs = 46 mins 20 secs remaining.

Using Bronstein time control. 40 mins + 30 secs/move

The computer has after the opening 40mins + nothing = 40 mins remaining

(And I was only refering to this 6mins 20 secs difference)

For John Tromp to have the same time under Fisher time control he also has to play 1 move per second.
While under Bronstein time control he won't get any difference as long as he is under 30 sec per move.

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

Ah, I was assuming you were comparing as advantage the computer gains over the human due to thinking times. Sure, if the human is slower but within 30 seconds there would be no difference between them at the end of the opening, but I'm not sure how much difference this makes or relevance this has. With 30 second delay timing, there is never any benefit in making a single move in less than 30 seconds, even if it is protecting against an atari of a 45 stone group, and I think this unnecessarily drags out the game. It is possible for the two sides to end up with very unbalanced overall times, and I don't consider this to be much of a benefit in a system.

Herman has raised some excellent points IMO.

Of course. With accumulation I mean the time you can use for a single move until you run out of time (e.g. because there's a complicated situation on the board and you need a lot of time to ponder on this move).


There are situations where a player can (and wants to) play a sequence of moves rather quickly. In the delay time system this time is spilt whereas in bonus time this time can be saved for later. It is obvious that spilling time is disadvantageous.

It looks from all the reactions that i am a very small minority (of one?)



I don't think we will ever agree on this. you see overtime as an full part of the time. And so every(?) spilling time system is unfair. (I hope I don't exaggerate to much)
While I see overtime as a method to prevent players pushing eachother into time pressure.
(what i do not find good sportmanship)

Or more practical, you would think of playing forcing moves (just) to get extra time as a good thing while i see them as ugly.

I guess it are just different ways to look at the game

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

I don't see it as unfair at all. But if I want to use my time optimally, then I should use those 28 seconds for something. In the case of taking back a ko, I have the choice to let them spill, or I can use them to already look at other ko threats, and only take back the ko on the 30th second. That way, I've gained thinking time, and used it, by not letting time spill. There is nothing unfair about it, as it is the same for both players. But my personal opinion is that I find it annoying to play with. The clock is "forcing" a pace on me.



Yes, but there is no inherent advantage of delay time (Bronstein) over bonus time (Fischer) in preventing this. If anything, delay time leads to more time pressure than bonus time, because you can never build your time back up.



No, I wouldn't. If you play forcing moves to gain time, you're losing ko threats at the same time. So they are not a good thing, they are bad moves, though they do gain time.

Also, the same moves also work with delay time. If I want 30 more seconds to think, I can play a forcing move on the 29th second, repeatedly if need be. This is the same also with byoyomi, where it is know as a "time tesuji". I've seen opponents play time tesujis that turned out to be aji keshi and lose them points in the endgame. So they were bad moves, though perhaps necessary for them from a time perspective.

I agree, I find Bronstein much more time pressured than Fischer



Bronstein makes this a worse issue than Fischer timing. There's no advantage to doing this in Fischer time unless your clock is literally about to run out. In delay timing, this tactic can hold advantages at every stage in the game. Got 8 minutes left on the clock but in a really difficult situation? No problem, waste your ko threats by playing out the forced sequence against that group over there 10 times and you buy yourself 5 minutes for free and still have 8 minutes left. In Fischer time, those moves will earn you the time whether you play them straight away or wait the full 30 seconds each time, so the tactic of deliberately waiting and playing a time tesuji doesn't apply. You'd only bother if that 8 minutes turned into 8 seconds.

you are all starting to convince me.

my last line of defencce is that the bonus time in Bronstein timing can be higher than in Fisher timing. (because of all the spilled time) But I guess that doesn't solve the problem



Thanks

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

Why should there be anything wrong with time pressure though?

There are many kinds of time pressures. There are several dimensions for time pressure, not just severity, but also smoothness and controllability of time pressure need to be considered.

If controllability of time pressure is high, such is the case wit 20 sec Fischer, we can always claim, that any time losses are due to time pressure and player did not find proper move within given time control. Thus time loss was justified.

But if in overtime, last moves of overtime period must always be done within few seconds before time loss, and time loss can be due to time pressure, but also external causes such as position of planets, may cause the time loss. E.g. on last weekend in championship qualifications I lost one game because on 15/5min Canadian overtime I played last stone of period on time, but I was quarter seconds too too slow in pressing the clock.

In this case, time loss had nothing to do with actual time pressure. Therefore within given time control there are always more dimensions than just time pressure that need to be considered. Time pressure itself is always good thing, because tournament schedule overrules always everything, but time pressure should be smooth and controllable.

Nothing per se, but there is a difference between time pressure and fooling around with a clock.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

This is more or less true, but I think Willemiens point was that it's still sometimes a mistake to respond without thinking. There are different replies to a ko threat, sometimes the opponent replies in a way that doesn't solve the problem, in such cases it's a mistake to take the ko without thinking, this happens now and then. Thinking a couple of seconds maybe you find a better reply to a ko threat than the most obvious one. Still,



I agree completely with this. Of course one can learn that sort of time management well and some players are very skilled at it. But it interrupts the natural flow of the game and the thought process, one would like to concentrate on what's most urgent. This is the most important advantage of Fischer time, compared to both byo-yomi and Canadian overtime.

Canadian overtime is the worst alternative in my opinion, it also includes having to keep in mind how many stones remain to be played, so the time planning becomes more important than it has to be, at the expense of thinking about what's going on at the board. Another potential disaster with Canadian is when a player ends up with say 10 stones to play in 5 seconds or something like that, so that the game ends in a completely silly way. Moreover, the intermittent stopping of clocks and counting up stones interrupts the concentration of both players.

Byo-yomi with only one period has the disadvantage that there is no time to think if the opponent e.g. throws in a corner invation that shouldn't work, so that the game ends either with loss on time or with a mistake that is below the level of the game as a whole.

Byo-yomi with more than one period is better in that respect, there is both time to carry out relatively trivial moves, and a pool of reserve time to use for solving some problem that turns up.

I have hardly ever played go with Fischer time, but I think it is probably best of the systems mentioned in this thread: there is always time to make a relatively trivial move, but it is also easy to build up a little reserve pool of time for problem solving. So I think Fischer time should be encouraged in go tournaments. Finally, organisers should choose their solutions to this sort of details freely, and the players should choose accordingly which tournaments they want to participate in!

cheers,
Henric

I find Fischer time a reasonable timing system. However if I had chance to program the clock's for a tournament with more than one round a day, I would set the increment to decrease when the game progresses. It might go down in steps or alternately the increment might be T/n. Where T is the increment for the first move and n is the number of the move to be played. If the player plays over 180 moves the increment could be 2-5 seconds for the remaining moves.

Based on the limited amount I know, I wouldn't have any qualms about being asked to use Fischer time in a go tournament, whereas I would normally refuse to play sudden death, and in real over-the-board play Canadiam byoyomi seems to create more problems than it solves.

But I have never used Fischer timing or seen it used, so I have a couple of questions.

1. Is it taking over in the chess world?

2. Where it is extensively used, have there been any complaints about abuse of the system or the need (if any) to plan time-management, such that newcomers to the system may have a significant disadvantage compared to those who have plans in stock, as kit were?

I am a little sceptical about some of the arguments used to support current byoyomi practice for go. One claim to counter the idea is that byoyomi is bad because the opponent might play an awkward invasion when you are under time pressure is that a player ought not to wall off an area unless he already knows how to defend it. I'd tend to repudiate that on the grounds that the short main time limits used in amateur games preclude analysing every loose end.

Having read a book by O Meien on the endgame recently, I have also come to the tentative conclusion that playing even a very lengthy endgame in byoyomi is, for pros, normally nothing like as onerous or skilful as it is usually taken to be. The necessary work is done by the pro before that stage and for them it looks quite simple, even in quickplay games. Byoyomi fits their way of play rather well. But, apart from the extra element of counting out stones, amateurs have to manage their time in an entirely different way and what's sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander when it comes to timing systems. At any rate, this contributes to my feeling of a provisional thumbs-up to Fischer timing.