Over the board chess is strictly time-limited and you do have to get on with things. In blitz you have to move so fast there is hardly time to calculate – you have to rely on knowledge and intuition to get you through. Even in the longest time controls at standardplay, you need a sense of purpose. You can’t just sit there wool-gathering.

By contrast, in correspondence chess you have so much time. The standard is 10 moves in 50 days (sometimes 40 or 30 days but it makes no real difference). When you have played 10 moves, another 50 days are added to your clock. If you used all your time then a really long game of 100 moves would take an elapsed period of nearly 18 months out of your life. Who needs that much time to play a game of chess? How long do you need to find the best move and play it?

My own approach is to use up only as much time as it takes and no more. I have the best commercially-available computer with the fastest processor running the strongest chess engines. It takes anything from a few minutes to an hour or two; and then I’m satisfied that waiting any longer is not going to improve the quality of the move, so I make the move. As a result, I always have the maximum time available although I never need it.

Some of my opponents seem to have a similar approach. Our games are played at a fast tempo with several moves being exchanged each day. The record for my completed games is vs the Italian player Mario Palladino where we each made 34 moves in less than one day. In just under 10% of my completed games, each player made at least 10 moves a day. Sometimes I get a message from my opponent at the end of the game thanking me for playing at a fast pace (the unspoken point is that many players slow the game down).

I wouldn’t want people to conclude that I and my opponents in these games think too fast and don’t play the best moves. We take as much time as we need and often that isn’t long at all.

But this post is going to be a rant, so now I’m going to focus on players who take much more time than they need. These seem to fall into two main categories.

First, players who realise they are losing and play as slowly as possible. Either they want to delay their final hours as long as they can, or they simply lose interest and the game becomes their lowest priority in life.

Second, players who take the maximum time available even if they don’t need it. This approach is diametrically-opposed to mine and I am still trying to understand the reasoning. It may be psychological.

Let’s start with an extreme example of the first category. This is my game against Player C. He is from Latvia, he has been playing correspondence chess for over 30 years, and his rating is currently similar to mine, although it was over 2500 at one point. The game is so short that I’m simply going to give all the moves.

Player C v Rodney Barking
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.Qc2 0-0 5.a3 Bxc3+ 6.bxc3?!
Very unusual. 6.Qxc3 is almost always played, preserving the purity of the pawn structure. Otherwise why take a move putting the queen on c2 in the first place?
6…c5 7.e4 c5 8.e5 Ne4 9.Bd3 Nc6 10.Ne2 cxd4
All this has been played before. There are 11 games in my database. White normally recaptures with 11.cxd4. But in this game…
11.Kf1??
I do not understand this move. It leaves White a pawn down with misplaced pieces and no compensation. The evaluation goes from about 0.00 to –2.5. Maybe it was a mouse-slip and he meant to play 11.0-0 although even that loses a pawn and White doesn’t have enough for it.
11…dxc3 12.Bxe4 dxe4

Now White can’t take the pawn on e4 because it’s mate next move on d1. Taking the pawn on c3 with the queen leaves Black two pawns up: 13.Qxc3 Qd1+ 14.Qe1 Qxe1+ 15.Kxe1 Nxe5. So does taking on c3 with the knight: 13.Nxc3 Qd4 and the c4 pawn drops. Developing moves like 13.Be3 allow 13…Qd3 with an overwhelming position.

So far my opponent had taken 4 days for his 12 moves, not lighting-fast but still a reasonable pace. But now he stopped. I waited. And I waited. Maybe it was the horror show in front of him but he did not make any more moves at all. 41 calendar days later, the server automatically terminated the game with a loss on time for White. The relevant provision in the 2023 ICCF Rules is section 2.6.2:

If a player does not move or otherwise indicate the player’s intention to continue
during 40 full calendar days (plus 24 hours’ buffer time, not including any leave time) for the same move, the game will be scored as an ETL (exceed time limit) loss.

And there’s a further penalty beyond losing on time. Section 2.4.4 provides:

A player who has exceeded the time allowed shall forfeit the game. If the
player is not under any ICCF suspension when this occurs, the player will be restricted
from registering for any event on the server for a period of 30 days.

So Player C will not be able to sign up for any new events for a whole month. But it does not affect his participation in any existing events. As it happens, Player C is part of the lineup for an event which has already been organised but has not yet started, in which I am also playing. That’s going to be interesting.

I did wonder whether his failure to move in this game might reflect some traumatic event in his life which had taken him away from the chess board and for which he had not taken the period of leave which the server allows. But that is not the case. During the 45 days in which the event has been running, Player C has completed 7 of his allotted 16 games as well as losing this one on time. So it was just a one-off personal tragedy of a game.

That was a case of a player delaying the game through loss of interest. Here’s a more common case where a player realises he is losing but continues to play, although at a much slower rate. I was White against Player D, who is from Poland. At the start of the game he outrated me by about 130 points.

Earlier in the game (by move 18) I had won the exchange through a tactic which my opponent did not see. I guess he was playing without engine assistance at that point. This is the position after White’s move 37. My opponent had already started to slow the game down. His moves 1 to 28 took only 11 days. Moves 29 to 36 took a further 60 days. And now he is clearly losing. My immediate plan is to push the c-pawn to c7, then play Rc4 forcing him to move his knight, then capture his advanced pawn on a2. After this the game is trivial.

My opponent must have worked out this was going to happen because he slowed the game down even further. The game continued 37…Qc6 38.Qxc6 Nxc6 39.Rxa2 after which queens are off the board, I’ve rounded up the a2 pawn, and I have the exchange and two pawns with a completely won position. His moves 37 to 38 took a further 40 days.

The ICCF recognises that players may slow the game down considerably in an attempt to postpone the inevitable. This strategy is known as the “Dead Man’s Defence.” Section 2.15 of the 2023 ICCF Rules concerns the Code of Conduct for players and has this to say:

Extremely slow play in a clearly lost position is not proper behaviour in correspondence chess play, and is subject to a warning from the TD, and will result in disciplinary action if it continues or is repeated in other games. This type of extremely slow play has been nicknamed the dead man’s defense (DMD). The defining characteristics are (a) being in a position that appears clearly lost presuming reasonable play AND (b) dramatically slowing play in that specific game.

The provision is activated when the opponent of the slow player makes a claim. I waited a further 10 days after my move 39 and then contacted the tournament director. He then followed the notification procedure set out in this part of the Rules, requiring my opponent to speed up and start playing at a normal rate again. There are severe penalties for a breach of the Code of Conduct, mainly taking the form of a ban from ICCF events for a certain period. At this point my opponent decided he’d had enough and he promptly resigned the game.

The ICCF does try to hurry players up if they take a long time over their moves. When a player is considering his next move, Rule 2.4.2 provides that real time applies for the first 20 days but after that double time applies (this is known as “duplication”) so that every extra day taken counts as two days on the player’s clock. The rule gives the example of a player taking 23 days over a move, which uses up 26 days on his clock. In other words, 20 days of normal time and 3 days of double time counting as 6 days on the clock.

The penalty for losing on time is based on calendar days (real time) rather than clock days. In the first example I gave, the game against Player C, the penalty was applied after 41 calendar days, but he had actually used up 62 days on his clock. He still had 38 days of clock time left in the game, but his inactivity for 41 calendar days amounted to a loss on time under the rules.

My view – others may not share this view – is that the initial period of 20 days reflection time is too generous. I think the ICCF should reduce this to 15 days or even 10 days. This raises the prospect of players running out of clock time (the clock reaches zero) before the period of 41 calendar days is used up. It would certainly focus the mind. I don’t know whether the ICCF has considered this idea.

But I now realise that this provision is the wrong target and the real problem lies elsewhere in the Rules. This brings me to the case of Player E. I am not going to give any details of his identity or the particular games in question since these are still live. Player E behaves in an extraordinary way. Whatever the standard period of time allowed for a set of 10 moves, he does nothing until almost all the time is used up and then makes a move at the last minute. So for example he might have only one day left for his next 10 moves and then he would finally make a move. You might think he would have to make 10 moves in one day to avoid his clock running out of time. But no. This is what Rule 2.4.2 provides:

Time is counted in days, not in hours, minutes, or seconds. If the first 24 hours has not yet been fully consumed, the reflection time used is counted as zero days. For the next days, a similar method of accounting time consumed will apply. Playing time is accounted for in whole days (24-hour periods). A player will have 24 hours of reflection time to respond to a move before one day of time is charged against the player’s clock by the ICCF webserver.

This means that if you have only 10 minutes remaining on your clock, and you then move, the clock resets itself to 24 hours and that is the time you have remaining for your next move. In effect you can make one move a day indefinitely and you will never lose on time. It’s similar to the incremental time control in OTB chess. You may be down to increment time on the clock (“living on the increment”), but as long as you continue to move within the increment period of, say, 30 seconds, you will never lose on time. The game will continue until it reaches its natural end. This is what happened in the infamous game T.Foster–P.Lalic (Guildford 2023) which ran to 214 moves after 7 hours of play before the final blunder and resignation.

This is being remedied in OTB chess for the next Guildford congress with a stricter time control. Should something similar be done for online correspondence chess? The obvious solution would be to remove the increment so that the clock does not reset itself to 24 hours every time you make a move. This already happens in the alternative timing arrangement known as “Triple Block” used for some ICCF events. Rule 2.4.2 sets out the relevant provision:

Time is counted in days, hours, and minutes. All time while “on-move” used counts and is never given back by rounding to the last full day.

I do not know how long Triple Block has been in use. Maybe this kind of provision is the future. It still leaves me with the problem of how to understand players who deliberately use up almost all of their time rather than only taking the time they need. I don’t think such players are simply disorganised. You have to be organised in order to make one move a day every day until you reach the next time control. I do wonder if the reason is psychological. The player is indulging in mind games by creating an expectation in his opponent’s mind of an imminent win on time, only to dash that hope at the last moment, so as to provoke the opponent into moving too quickly (“blitzing”) and making an error. Who knows? Only Player E can tell us and he’s not saying anything.

I do have one further idea to encourage quicker play. This could be implemented without any changes to the time control arrangements. The server knows how much time has elapsed in every game played by each player in an event. If there is a tie between two or more players and none of the tie-breaks can separate them, for example they have exactly the same number of points, the same number of victories, no advantage in direct encounter, and the same sum of opponents’ scores, then an additional tie-break could be implemented to favour the player who has used the least amount of elapsed time.