NOW IT ' S GETTING CRAZY – BULLET CHESS
The ultimate form of“ sudden death” time control is bullet chess, in which each player has just a single minute on his clock at the game ' s start. Bullet players often view their game as not only a test of board visualization and calculation speed, but also as a test of nerves between the players as each always feels as though they ' re under the proverbial gun for the full two minute duration of the game.
TIME INCREMENTS – NO MORE POORLY-PLAYED ENDGAMES
A common complaint among“ sudden death” chess ' detractors( former World Champion Bobby Fischer among them) was that the limited time control rewarded chess opening specialists at the expense of the endgame. Players who memorized chess openings by rote could bang out their initial moves in a very short time, but chess endgames tended to be full of errors – by the time the endgame was reached, players often had mere minutes( or even seconds) left on their clocks. This even applied to the professional levels of chess play; beautiful games were often ruined by poor endgame play caused by the players experiencing“ time pressure”( this was the theory, at least).
When Bobby Fischer emerged from his self-imposed chess exile in the early 1990 ' s, he began to advocate a new form of chess timing which he occasionally claimed to have invented( this, by the way, is incorrect, as players of the Asian game Go had been using this alternate timing form for years). This“ new” timing scheme became known as incremental or delay timing.
In delay timing, each time a player ' s clock is started( after his opponent completes a move), a small amount of time is added to the player ' s time. No matter what, the player will always have at least that( small) amount of time to make a move. A typical delay time control might expressed as“ 30 min. + 5 sec.” That means each player has thirty minutes on his / her clock at the start of the game, and each time the player ' s clock is started, the player has five seconds added to his / her time.
Here ' s how it works in practice, using the time control just mentioned. A player starts with 30 minutes on his clock;( so his clock would read 30:00). He uses ten seconds thinking about whether he wants to open with his e-pawn or d-pawn as White. After he moves, he hits his clock, and his clock now reads 29:50. As soon as his opponent makes his move
228 chessking. com