(More) On adjournments ...

The time control for the Championship is 40/2, 20/1, SD/30 with adjournments after the first four hour session. In the most recent issue of Chess Horizons, Ken Ho took up the discussion of adjournments in the context of sudden death time controls:

.... Certainly Alex [Slive] and I both enjoyed the hours we put into adjournment analysis for our interesting endgame. I don't see a strong reason to have a sudden death time control for this tournament ...

If you're returning on another day to play an adjournment, it would be great to know that you'd be able to have the same generous (I would say "reasonable," but perceptions of what constitutes "reasonable" seem to have changed over time) amount of average time per move, preserving chances to maintain a higher quality of play. It seems that if there is an adjournment, players wouldn't necessarily object to returning for, say, 2-4 hours instead of just the 1 afforded by SD/30, since they'd be coming back to the club on another day ...

From "Boylston Chess Club Paramount Tournament" by Ken Ho, Chess Horizons July-September 2004, pg. 15.

Ken makes an interesting point -- either a tournament allows for adjournments or it doesn't. If adjournments are provided for after the first session it seems unnecessary to force closure through sudden death in a subsequent session. I suppose the counter argument is that most players and TDs want to avoid long, drawn out multiple adjournment games that take too many calendar days to complete. While one might think that multiple adjournment games would be fairly rare (and they probably are), I have been involved in two such encounters during previous Hauptturniers. For the record the time control for the Paramount was 30/75, 24/60, SD/30.

See also my previous post "On adjournments ..."