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Either stop the problem with time wasters or I revoke my donations.

Honestly, there are opinions all over the place with this thread, and opinions about opinions... yet we all struggle with definitions.

I have created branch https://github.com/ddugovic/rust-pgn-reader/tree/clock in an attempt to collect examples from https://database.lichess.org/ and thereby produce an objective definition of "time waster".

Anyone can do research... https://lichess.org/api provides many endpoints, although it doesn't have one for "identify games where time was wasted" or one for "identify players who were banned for wasting time". And that's fine, it just means I get to learn Rust while doing research.

Honestly, there are opinions all over the place with this thread, and opinions about opinions... yet we all struggle with definitions. I have created branch https://github.com/ddugovic/rust-pgn-reader/tree/clock in an attempt to collect examples from https://database.lichess.org/ and thereby produce an objective definition of "time waster". Anyone can do research... https://lichess.org/api provides many endpoints, although it doesn't have one for "identify games where time was wasted" or one for "identify players who were banned for wasting time". And that's fine, it just means I get to learn Rust while doing research.

Thank you for your interest and support @Toadofsky .

Thank you for your interest and support @Toadofsky .

#50: "[W]hat is the alternative to voicing your anger in the forums[?]"

Writing politely in the forums. :-)

Yes, thanks again Toadofsky. BTW, is your name pronounced Toh'dawf'skee, Too'Adoff'skee, Tohd'uv'skigh, or none of the above? Just curious. ^_^

#50: "[W]hat is the alternative to voicing your anger in the forums[?]" Writing politely in the forums. :-) Yes, thanks again Toadofsky. BTW, is your name pronounced Toh'dawf'skee, Too'Adoff'skee, Tohd'uv'skigh, or none of the above? Just curious. ^_^

Wow this was such a waste of time reading this.

Wow this was such a waste of time reading this.

#53 Truly, a great mystery. :-) I don't know.

#53 Truly, a great mystery. :-) I don't know.

@Toadofsky I like your 3 for 1 approach: create while researching and learning the tools to create, and so forth. it is hard to disentangle and order the three aspects (question, answer, tools), so why not dive anywhere and figure it out. also mixing feature and metrics is a nice front of development, hopefully i make sense.

@Toadofsky I like your 3 for 1 approach: create while researching and learning the tools to create, and so forth. it is hard to disentangle and order the three aspects (question, answer, tools), so why not dive anywhere and figure it out. also mixing feature and metrics is a nice front of development, hopefully i make sense.

I personally think that you will create more problems for serious chess players than you will solve if you try too hard to prevent "time wasting." On chess.com I have twice lost games due to "abandonment" because chess.com has an obscure rule designed to accomplish precisely what you all are talking about. The rule on chess.com says that if you use 50% or more of your time on a single move before move 10 you lose the game. I guess their assumption was that no one would ever do this except if he was abandoning the game. Well, twice I found myself with a complicated position before move 10 and since I was playing with increment I figured I could spend a few minutes thinking. Before I knew it I had lost the game. We have a way of limiting the time players can spend on a game: the time control! As far as I am concerned, if my opponent wants to disconnect and let his clock run down, more power to him; I win the game and collect rating points. I would much rather deal with that than to have some obscure rule tell me that I have lost the game because I am using too much time (even though I have time on my clock!). How do you know if I am being a jerk and letting my time run down or looking for a swindle attempt or looking for a miraculous defense? Let players do with their time what they want. So much of modern internet chess seems designed to punish and discourage thinking. Chess is supposed to be a game of thinking! Let people use their time please.

I personally think that you will create more problems for serious chess players than you will solve if you try too hard to prevent "time wasting." On chess.com I have twice lost games due to "abandonment" because chess.com has an obscure rule designed to accomplish precisely what you all are talking about. The rule on chess.com says that if you use 50% or more of your time on a single move before move 10 you lose the game. I guess their assumption was that no one would ever do this except if he was abandoning the game. Well, twice I found myself with a complicated position before move 10 and since I was playing with increment I figured I could spend a few minutes thinking. Before I knew it I had lost the game. We have a way of limiting the time players can spend on a game: the time control! As far as I am concerned, if my opponent wants to disconnect and let his clock run down, more power to him; I win the game and collect rating points. I would much rather deal with that than to have some obscure rule tell me that I have lost the game because I am using too much time (even though I have time on my clock!). How do you know if I am being a jerk and letting my time run down or looking for a swindle attempt or looking for a miraculous defense? Let players do with their time what they want. So much of modern internet chess seems designed to punish and discourage thinking. Chess is supposed to be a game of thinking! Let people use their time please.

Several days of manual effort into researching, due to my own struggles with bunzip2, PGN and Rust I don't have exact numbers, however:

  • About 10% of rated classical games are decided by disconnection or timeout. (The rate for rapid and faster is even higher.)
  • About 80-90% of those disconnections or timeouts occur with more than 8% of the clock remaining (or with the player's last move spending more than 8% of the clock time).

That all said, a bug with "Claim Victory" not appearing was recently fixed so urgency of understanding this is reduced. Again, here's my code so far:
https://github.com/ddugovic/rust-pgn-reader/commits/clock
and the games:
https://database.lichess.org/

Several days of manual effort into researching, due to my own struggles with bunzip2, PGN and Rust I don't have exact numbers, however: * About 10% of rated classical games are decided by disconnection or timeout. (The rate for rapid and faster is even higher.) * About 80-90% of those disconnections or timeouts occur with more than 8% of the clock remaining (or with the player's last move spending more than 8% of the clock time). That all said, a bug with "Claim Victory" not appearing was recently fixed so urgency of understanding this is reduced. Again, here's my code so far: https://github.com/ddugovic/rust-pgn-reader/commits/clock and the games: https://database.lichess.org/

@RandallRhoads,

All fair points. I will just give, as a counter-example, a game I recently played:

https://lichess.org/GmAVcec1UxFI

It was a 30-minute game, and my opponent made his first two moves -- then waited till he had just one minute left before playing the rest of the game, bullet style. During his ~29 minutes of inactivity, I asked him if he was still there -- with no reply. But his icon was green, so I assumed he was. And once he started scrambling to play, I easily beat him (of course -- despite moving more quickly than I needed to, myself, from impatience). But he had succeeded in wasting half an hour of my time, which I might have spent playing with someone who took our match more seriously.

What's more, such an approach could be used to "game the system." You say you'd be confident of banking that victory; but if you assumed you were winning, and browsed away, and your opponent returned (literally) at the last minute, as mine did, then the victory might ultimately go to him. Worse, some algorithms (such as Toadofsky's) might even assume you were the one wasting his time, in that event. ;( I have a suspicion this is exactly what my opponent was hoping would happen; he didn't expect me to wait patiently all that while. He wanted to trick me, and win a game (as it were) for free. Perhaps he did the same thing in several simultaneous matches, with a reasonable expectation of "winning" more than half of them, on time or through his opponents' resignation from boredom. lichess currently allows you to do that; cf. https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/this-should-not-be-possible

I also stress that this lapse occurred at the beginning of the game. And I very much doubt anyone could possibly require that much time to think of a second or third move, after having already committed to an opening. In such cases, he is clearly not thinking about the game. And this is what is so objectionable about the practice.

Finally, while Chess.com's rule is perhaps imperfectly implemented (one could quibble about the number of moves or percentage of the clock), if you are spending more than half your time in the opening, you probably aren't managing your time correctly, and that is something you will need to work on anyway. (So not triggering their "cheat" detection is the least of your worries.) Whereas I have little doubt the vast majority of such cases occur in games where people aren't doing that work. So on balance, I'd say they've taken a viable approach to solving this problem. You are an unfortunate, but rare casualty of their chosen method. And I still think they have the right idea.

Does this answer some of your questions?

@RandallRhoads, All fair points. I will just give, as a counter-example, a game I recently played: https://lichess.org/GmAVcec1UxFI It was a 30-minute game, and my opponent made his first two moves -- then waited till he had just one minute left before playing the rest of the game, bullet style. During his ~29 minutes of inactivity, I asked him if he was still there -- with no reply. But his icon was green, so I assumed he was. And once he started scrambling to play, I easily beat him (of course -- despite moving more quickly than I needed to, myself, from impatience). But he had succeeded in wasting half an hour of my time, which I might have spent playing with someone who took our match more seriously. What's more, such an approach could be used to "game the system." You say you'd be confident of banking that victory; but if you assumed you were winning, and browsed away, and your opponent returned (literally) at the last minute, as mine did, then the victory might ultimately go to him. Worse, some algorithms (such as Toadofsky's) might even assume _you_ were the one wasting _his_ time, in that event. ;( I have a suspicion this is exactly what my opponent was hoping would happen; he didn't expect me to wait patiently all that while. He wanted to trick me, and win a game (as it were) for free. Perhaps he did the same thing in several simultaneous matches, with a reasonable expectation of "winning" more than half of them, on time or through his opponents' resignation from boredom. lichess currently allows you to do that; cf. https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/this-should-not-be-possible I also stress that this lapse occurred at the beginning of the game. And I very much doubt anyone could possibly require that much time to think of a second or third move, after having already committed to an opening. In such cases, he is clearly _not_ thinking about the game. And this is what is so objectionable about the practice. Finally, while Chess.com's rule is perhaps imperfectly implemented (one could quibble about the number of moves or percentage of the clock), if you are spending more than half your time in the opening, you probably aren't managing your time correctly, and that is something you will need to work on anyway. (So not triggering their "cheat" detection is the least of your worries.) Whereas I have little doubt the vast majority of such cases occur in games where people _aren't_ doing that work. So on balance, I'd say they've taken a viable approach to solving this problem. You are an unfortunate, but rare casualty of their chosen method. And I still think they have the right idea. Does this answer some of your questions?

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