AS SANDS THOUGH THE HOURGLASS – THE CHESS CLOCK
It ' s a joke as old as the hills. Two grandmasters sit for hours, motionless, staring intently at the position on the chess board between them. Finally one of them speaks up,“ Oh! Is it my move?”
Believe it or not, that sort of thing used to happen quite deliberately in some very famous chess games in the 1800 ' s. In a form of“ meta gamesmanship”( as we ' d call it today), young players used to deliberately take an incredibly long time to make a move, hoping to wear down their older opponents through sheer fatigue. It was to combat that sort of behavior that the chess clock was introduced. A chess clock is actually two interconnected clocks; when one clock is stopped, the other clock starts( and vice versa). After a player makes a move, he presses the button on his clock to stop it and start his opponent ' s clock. In this way the elapsed time for both players can be regulated.
With the advent of digital chess clocks( which can add a variable bit of time after a move, as we ' ll see), a wide variety of time controls are possible. Chess games still can be very long drawn out affairs 9as many people traditionally think of them) or be very fast indeed; in bullet chess each player gets just one minute on his clock in which he must complete the entire game.
In this chapter you ' re going to learn how several chess time controls work, and how to set up and use these time controls in Chess King.
225 chessking. com