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BGonline.org Forums
Time to talk about time settings
Posted By: Chuck Bower
Date: Thursday, 26 March 2009, at 5:22 p.m.
David Rubin's post reminded me of something I've been thinking about but haven't posted for discussion.
Currently the ABT default default settings for a singles match are 12 free seconds per move (known as "delay" time in the clock settings manuals) and 2 reserve minutes per matchpoint (sometimes called "bonus" time). The idea of changing one or both of these has been brought up for many reasons on many occasions. There are really two topics here and I'm trying to address the LESS CONTROVERSIAL of those and that is IF you are going to change the current ABT defaults, how do you reapportion the time? (If you want to argue the merits or pitfalls of lengthening or shortening the overall match durations I suggest a separate thread, please.)
I see two arguments which point to one technique over the other:
1) Consider two types of players -- player A seldom thinks a long time on any single play but likes to mull over many decisions for several seconds. Player B, OTOH, usually sees the play he wants to make quickly and then makes it and hits the clock. But player B also likes to occasionally ponder a play/cube decision for several minutes.
It follows that Player A often uses his full free time/move and frequently spills over to use a couple seconds of his reserve time. Player B usually hits the clock with free time still remaining but when occasionally he uses up more than a minute (up to several minutes) on a single play.
If the clock rules are changed to allow more free time/move it could help out player A; it doesn't help player B. If the reserve time is decreased, it probably doesn't help out player A but it almost certainly (in some matches, anyway) hurts player B.
The flipside is not symmetric. If more bonus time is added, player A isn't hurt and may gain as his couple seconds per move over his free time decrements his bonus time, but he gets more bonus time to use. Player B now gets more bonus time for his infrequent but long contemplation sessions. So at worst it's a push-win.
2) One thing seldom discussed quantitatively (and understandably so, because of lack of data) is TOTAL DURATION OF MATCHES as a function of clock settings. (I did this for 7-point matches in my study which is posted at Tom Keith's site: http://www.bkgm.com/articles/Bower/ClockExperiment.html). Let's say that you know for the current settings the distribution of match durations. If you change the settings it will change the distribution. My claim (without proof) is that changing the free time per move not only leads to an unknown distribution, but will INCREASE the variance of match times. Increasing the variance effectively increases the duration IF your intent is to hold the number of forfeited matches to a minimum. OTOH, the bonus time is much more closely related to match duration and shouldn't affect the variance by much.
Let's give an example -- suppose we set the clocks for the ABT standard for a 7 point match, which means each player starts with 14 minutes of reserve time (i.e. 2 minutes per matchpoint). If you decide to increase the time to 3 minutes per matchpoint, the clock bonus time becomes 21 minutes per player. Disregarding psychological changes in play, this should at most increase the match durations by 14 minutes. If instead you change the free time per move to 15 seconds you don't have an easy way to predict how much the match durations change and (my unproven contention) the spread in the distribution of match times increases considerably.
My conclusion is that, assuming the current settings are close to being reasonable but tweaks are desirable, it's better to change the reserve time per matchpoint than the free time per move.
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