Sudden-death blitz games are played with 3/0 and 5/0 and these are most often played on other chess sites and tournaments.
On the other hand, blitz with increment is a total mess....everyone sticks to his own uncommon time combination; this means you must play under unfamiliar time-control, or force the opponent to do so. We need some standardization. If there are more official tournaments with increments, officially used combination would slowly become a de-facto standard.
How other players think?
I think ICC, long ago the biggest place to chess online, solved this problem really well. They did something really simple but also really effective. They had pooled games for certain time controls that had ratings only for that time control. So for instance you pressed a 5 button and you were immediately place into the pool for the 5 minute games and automatically matched up against another player. There was no aborting, no rematching, or anything. You press the button to get into the pool and everything is taken care of automatically and the game is rated only for that pool.
These pooled games were hugely popular and eventually overcome even the old style manual pairings like we have on here. The pools also help standardize time controls. Create a 3 2 pool and suddenly there will be a ton of people playing 3 2. The pool system also has some of the most accurate ratings you'll get online since there's no fishing for opponents who might be off their game/drunk/etc as some do.
Pools are an interesting idea, but I don't think it will work with all the variants we got here. Also, I feel it would remove some freedom, though that's probably exactly the idea behind the system: give the user limited options, so the probability of two players choosing the same option becomes higher.
Here's pools, guys:
lichess.org/tournamentEven better, every now and then, there's a winner!
#4
the roast is too stronk
When playing blitz, I almost exclusively play 3+2 (which is sort of a standardized time control) and I usually get paired rather quickly.
It's true that I rarely actually see 3+2 seeks in the lobby, but I think that's in fact because people get paired so quickly at this time control (whereas some whacky seeks like 1+7 might stay there for several minutes).
Is it really so different at your rating range?
Thibault, pools are different from tournaments; pools work 24 hours a day. And there are very few official tournaments with increments. What we need is some time-control with increment which everyone naturally tend to follow.
I don't know 3+2 is so popular or not.... as a first step, some stats of actually played time combinations would be very helpful.
I was watching the seek list and found more than a dozon combinations in less than 5 minutes! 2+2, 3+1/2/3/7, 5+1/2/3/4/5/8, 6+8 and 7+2. I repeat, it's a total mess. Blitz with increment surely has its fans, but clearly there are too many time combinations.
Those weird time controls are kinda over-represented in the seek list because (within the same rating range) there'll never be several seeks with the exact same time control - they'd get paired instantly.
So, you see all those crazy seeks and at the same time there's at most one 3+2 or 5+0 seek while those two time controls are in fact a lot more popular. If you refresh the page a few times, you'll often notice the 3+2 and 5+0 seeks disappear / get replaced with new seeks from different users while the odd seeks remain.
Still, I'd greatly appreciate if there were more 3+2 tournaments. :)
Tournies aren't really a reasonable comparison to pooled games for quite a lot of reasons. Tournaments have a major time commitment and often end up with disproportionate pairings for higher rated players. Tournaments also have scheduling as opposed to play as you feel and also use the 'blob' ratings of blitz or whatever. Right now 3 0, 3 2, 5 0, 7 0, 2 12, and all other sorts of time controls are just lumped together even though people's individual performance in different time controls within that range varies wildly, and also includes hand chosen games which further distorts ratings.
But ultimately I think it can all be looked at in terms of the big picture. If Lichess started offering a 3 2 pooled game, the time control would become quickly popular. If they started offering more 3 2 tournaments, I don't think too much would change.
