Speaking of funny stuff on Twitter

Greg Shahade has taken over the USCF's Twitter feed during the Nationals Tournament (for schoolchildren). He tweets the following:

I just saw someone resign for his opponent. He reached across the board, knocked over his King, and said "you resign".His opponent disagreed

— US Chess (@USChess) May 8, 2016

Faster it is.

I posted a link to Greg Shahade's call for faster time controls the other day. Looks like he'll get his wish, at least for one top tournament. The Zurich Chess Challenge in early 2016 will feature a "time control of 40 minutes per game with additional 10 seconds for each move," per their web site. The six participants will be Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian, Anish Giri, Vladimir Kramnik, Hikaru Nakamura, and Alexei Shirov. You can read more about it there.

h/t Chess24.com

A call for faster games!

From Greg Shahade, Slow Chess should die a fast death. 

Slow chess should disappear and be replaced by rapid chess. Rapid chess should not be rapid chess, it should be chess. What should the standard time control be? Something like 30+5 second increment sounds perfect to me. And when I suggest 30+5, please note that I’m choosing a time control this slow only to appease the masses. I think 15+5 is more appropriate.

Why is slow chess so horrible? There are so so many reasons. But the main one is the simplest:

People don’t like to play slow chess!

Now wait you might tell me, “I really do love to play slow chess, and so do all of my friends”.

I have an answer for you: “No you don’t”.

The main thing Shahade misses is that slower time controls DO allow for players to get deeper into the positions. We've seen that at our club. We can get interesting games in 15 minute games, but there's a limit to how well we can explore them. Heck, sometimes we can tear into one of those games afterwards and spend an hour going over it! How much better would the game be if that kind of time were spent during the game?

And watching some of you in tournaments recently I can definitively state that longer games allow some of you to get much deeper into a position. Here I'm thinking of Jim McTigue in particular, as with his recent game against Lauren Kleidermacher, but it applies to others as well.

Ultimately, the market has spoken on this front, both at the top level and down at our modest levels - people like slow games for tournaments. There are any number of chances to play at more rapid time controls, both in tournaments and in clubs. I don't think Alex Zelner's rapid tournaments do any better than he game 90 tournaments attendance-wise, at least not when I was regularly playing in them. So I don't think we need to get rid of the slower time controls just yet.