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BGonline.org Forums
Ruling questions
Posted By: mamabear In Response To: Time warning for digital clocks (Chuck Bower)
Date: Wednesday, 11 February 2009, at 2:58 p.m.
1. Are these beep warnings, if allowed at all, going to be optional/compulsory/"insistable"/merely a courtesy? If optional, do both players have to agree? (If not, we have crossed over to "insistable".)
2. At a tourney where clocks will be used if either player wants them and can provide one, as was the case in Charlotte and which is becoming common, can a player refuse to play with a clock if the one his opponent provides doesn't have the warning feature? We are assuming the clock is otherwise up to the standard of the Excalibur II, and is perhaps some earlier model.
3. The clock is in use, and has the warning feature, but either the owner/player or the director forgot or failed to set the beeper. The opponent's flag falls, and he wants 30 seconds more time because he wasn't warned and expected that he would be.
4. The beeper was incorrectly set to 10 seconds when 30 was the norm--so the player wants 20 seconds added to his clock now that it has beeped.
All these questions are answerable, but IMO need to be answered in advance, not after the beeps have come into common use.
My personal opinion is that warning beeps should be permitted, but not required or "insistable", and that it is up to both players to check that they are set as agreed if they decide to use them. The default would be 30 seconds, but if both players agreed to some other beeper setting it would be permitted. The overall default regarding warnings would be that they aren't in use.
I would allow a director to insist on warning beeps as a courtesy for a new clock user if the opponent doesn't want to show them that courtesy, which I think any decent player would do without the director intervening. In such a case, if the opponent's clock doesn't have the beep feature, the director would provide one that does, explain it to both players, and set it for them. I don't think this situation would arise often enough to cause a director to run out of beepable clocks. (It might never arise in practice.)
The above policy would lead to these answers to the above questions: 1. Optional but not insistable. 2. No. 3. Tough bananas, even in the presumably rare case where mechanical failure of the clock's warning feature was the cause of the problem. 4. Ditto.
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