WHEN THE FLAG FALLS,
YOU'RE DONE - SUDDEN DEATH
The problem with traditional time controls, at least as far as organizers of
small, local chess tournaments were concerned, was that a chess game
was still potentially endless (at least in theory). It made the scheduling of
tournament rounds difficult and, worse yet, many organizers had to rent
a facility in which to hold a tournament and could only use the room at
most for two or three days (if that).
That's why “sudden death” time controls became very popular in the mid
to late twentieth century. “Sudden death” refers to a time setting in which
each player has a set, finite amount of time to complete all of his moves.
For example, in a “Game in 60” event, each player starts the game with
sixty minutes on his or her clock. That's all the time he or she gets to make
all of their moves. If a player oversteps his time, he or she loses, no matter
what the situation on the board might be. A player could be winning by a
Queen and a Rook, but if his clock's flag (a built-in warning device used
to judge when a player has used all of his time) falls because he's used
all of his time, he loses the game.
This made running a chess tournament much easier. For example, a
“Game in 60” tournament could space the start times for each round two
hours apart and know exactly how long an event would take and when it
would end (and could rent a venue accordingly).
THE PIECES WERE A BLUR – BLITZ CHESS
Sudden death time controls for official (rated) events stayed in the “Game
in 30” to “Game in 60” range, but players of casual games began to
experiment with faster and faster play. This led to the development of
speed chess or, as it's more generally known, blitz chess. While the term
“blitz chess” originally referred exclusively to games in which each player
had five minutes on his clock, today it's more generally applied to games
in which each player has less than 25 minutes starting clock time.
While blitz chess traditionally appealed to younger players, its popularity
has expanded in recent years to encompass all ages of chess players.
It can be argued that this is due to the rise of Internet chess as the
preferred playing form (while I'm aware of no studies on the subject, it's
quite likely that more chess is played online than face to face these days).
Another boost to the popularity of blitz chess was the introduction of
digital chess clocks in the 1990's, which can be more precisely set than
cantheir analog counterparts.
227
chessking.com