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Is 2 minutes enough clock reserve time?

Posted By: Rich Munitz
Date: Tuesday, 9 June 2009, at 12:23 a.m.

As I'm starting to have a critical mass of clock experience under my belt, and there have been many matches played with clocks this year by many, I am starting to personally question whether 2 minutes of reserve is sufficient. I do firmly believe now that a 12 second delay is right.

I have played 11 point matches where I've used only 2 minutes of my reserve. I have also played matches where I've gotten down to a few minutes or even 40 seconds once. I've seen the same variability amongst my opponents. The number of games, the difficulty or ease of decisions, the number of situations that demand pipcounts or match equity calculations all factor into the equation.

My feeling is that any match in which both players walk away at the end and feel that the match was played at a reasonable pace, should not leave either player down below about 15% of the initial reserve time. In my opinion, I am seeing too many cases where this threshold is being exceeded. Sure anyone with dexterity and half a brain can make legal moves forever on a 12 second delay, but that's not the game we want to play, is it?

I am starting to be of the opinion that 2.5/12 is a more optimal TC. Adding an extreme maximum of 11 minutes to the length of an 11 point match does not seem like too much of a sacrifice. I think it will still eliminate the 3 1/2 hour matches which is the goal, but it will help to alleviate the many situations I'm seeing or reading about where people are running low when they are not playing at an unreasonable pace for the circumstances. And I don't think having many people experience that over the next year as clocks roll out is a good thing. As an introductory measure, I think it makes sense. But the more clocked matches I see, the more I think it makes sense period.

I cannot imagine the US Open finals having been decided by a clock timeout. Neither player was playing unreasonably slowly for the parts I watched.

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