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BGonline.org Forums
Timing breaks
Posted By: Nack Ballard In Response To: Timing breaks (Chuck Bower)
Date: Sunday, 26 June 2011, at 6:40 p.m.
I'm going to respond to Henrik's suggestion, which has some commonality to yours. However, yours seems more complicated (and time consuming) for the players and possibly the staff as well. When the break time is breached someone needs to adjust the game clock as well as return the break clock to the director's table -- resulting in more overall time lost. And the director has more equipment to monitor/maintain (if I understand your proposal).
I like Henrik's suggestion, too; it is more practical than mine. That is, sandtimers are more portable than analog clocks (and cheaper if you don't happen to have one of the latter), OR they don't have to checked out from the tournament desk. (Note the "or," because it's one or the other, not both).
The "advantage" of my suggestion is that you can charge the breaks at a different rate (e.g., an extra 5 minutes costs only 3 minutes or whatever the posted rate is). The tournament staff need be involved, but I agree that it is more complicated to deduct time from the main clock than press the button and let it run down (at 100% rate).
I had proposed the partial-break charge as a possible compromise between the current situation of rampant break abuse and Chiva's proposal of having clocks always run through breaks. Henrik's proposal is also a compromise, but closer to Chiva's (i.e., in effect further away from the current rules) than mine is.
In terms of result, Henrik's suggestion is the same as mine except that his offers only the option of charging breaks at 100%. Charging breaks at a lower rate does complicate, but that could be solved by making clocks smarter, and in the meantime we could go with Henrik's simpler sandtimer-then-100% solution.
Chiva's proposal is what is used in chess and I don't understand why some backgammon players perceive it to be so great a hardship (other than resistance to change). Chess players learn to go to the bathroom, smoke, make phone calls, etc. before and after the contest, and if they don't plan well then they're charged a little time. Is that so terrible? The current environment makes it difficult to monitor or enforce breaks: this is often tantamount to a heightened or extreme insensitivity to others and ends up wasting everybody's time.
There are some differences between chess and backgammon. A chess contest is measured in one continuous game, whereas backgammon has a pause after each game of a match; that argues for using one or two of these for mutual breaks. Still, if one person doesn't want a break, he is being "penalized" for having to sit around (dead time) when he might rather finish the match and use his time in some other way; it seems reasonable that he should be compensated (and all the more so when the mutual break -- which arguably should already not exist -- is over).
There is another difference that has yet to be addressed. In chess, if you take a break, the opponent has the option to make his move before you return, and think on YOUR time. That option is not available in backgammon because the break occurs between games of a match. Hence the "penalty" for taking a break in chess is greater than it is in backgammon even if we change the rules to be more like chess. That argues for Chiva's proposal being more than reasonable, which I believe it is.
Nack
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