Survey of League Chess
The starting time of matches; how colours are decided; the default period for absent players; how games are concluded; the time control to be used. These are all issues that chess leagues have to face. Of course, each league will make decisions based on its own circumstances. But it might be interesting to know what decisions other leagues have made. Are some outcomes more popular than others? Can one discern trends in the larger picture?
I recently carried out a survey of league chess to find the answers. As the analysis will show, there were some interesting results.
Methodology
For practical reasons, I limited the scope of the survey to chess leagues in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I identified the leagues from three different websites (as well as through general internet searches). These were:
- the list of Clubs and Associations on the English Chess Federation website;
- the British Chess Associations and Clubs website maintained by Tryfon Gavriel;
- the Chingland ("Chess in England") website maintained by Martyn Harris.
I also limited the survey to leagues using standardplay rather than rapidplay (standardplay means that each player has at least 60 minutes to make all his moves).
In about two-thirds of cases, information about the playing rules was available on each league's website. In the remaining cases I sought information by letter or email from relevant league and club officials. I am very grateful for their co-operation.
I managed to obtain information on 108 leagues. These are listed at the end. I was hoping to get a complete list of all currently active leagues, but I was unable to find anything on a very small number of leagues: Doncaster; Dyfed; Humber. If anyone has information on these leagues then I would be very pleased to receive it.
The information on each league, together with the URL for the website or the name of the person supplying information, is also available as a download in various formats. This summarises what in some cases are complex or diverse playing rules. For example, some leagues have different starting times for different clubs, or different time controls for different divisions. I have taken the latest starting time or the longest time control, and referred to earlier or shorter ones in a comments section.
Geographical location of leagues
Table 1 shows where each league is located. The vast majority are in England. Northern Ireland is a separate entry, as it is no longer affiliated to the Irish Chess Union.
The English leagues are distributed all over the country, although there is a concentration in and around urban areas such as London. Elsewhere there are some wilderness areas. Isolated clubs such as Scarborough in North Yorkshire face an 80-mile round trip to play in the nearest league (York & District).
Table 1
| Area | No. |
| England | 90 |
| Scotland | 10 |
| Wales | 4 |
| Northern Ireland | 1 |
| Republic of Ireland | 3 |
108 |
The starting time of matches
Table 2 shows the different starting times used and their frequency. The afternoon starting times are all for Saturday or weekend leagues: the 4NCL, Devon, Yorkshire, and Munster (12:00, with a second match at 17:00) – and possibly others, where I do not have Information on starting times.
Of the weekday evening leagues, the four early starters (at 18:30) are all in London: Civil Service, Combined Banks & Insurance, London Banks, London Commercial. There does not seem to be any obvious reason for this. One might suppose that matches start early because the players go straight from work without making what could be a lengthy journey home to get changed and eat first. But one would expect this pattern of behaviour to apply in other large metropolitan areas too. And the other London leagues all start later than these three.
The latest starter (at 20:00) is Cambridge University. As this is an internal university league, whose players are students based in college or in the city itself, the journey home at the end will be short, so a later finish (and therefore a later start) is workable.
One starting time (19:30) is more popular than all the rest put together. The leagues concerned must have come to the same conclusion about the optimum starting time, given journey times to and from the venue, and the amount of time available for playing chess in the evening.
Table 2
| Starting time | No. |
| 12:00 | 1 |
| 14:00 | 1 |
14:30 |
2 |
| 18:30 | 4 |
| 19:00 | 7 |
| 19:15 | 10 |
| 19:30 | 60 |
| 19:40 | 1 |
| 19:45 | 8 |
| 20:00 | 1 |
| Information not available | 13 |
108 |
How colours are decided
Table 3 shows the different ways of deciding the colours for each board. There are two main options. The first one is the toss of a coin: either the winner chooses the board colours, or else the winner automatically has White on the odd boards. These generally amount to the same thing in practice since captains who win the toss almost always choose White on the odd boards anyway. The second one is a rule specifying that one of the teams (usually the away team) shall have White on the odd boards.
The toss of a coin is the traditional way of making decisions at the start of the contest in a range of sports. It can have a significant effect on the result (test cricket and the Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race come to mind). Where there is an advantage to be gained, the toss can be seen as an impartial way of conferring it on one side. In chess, the player with the White pieces has a slight advantage: in the 4.5 million games in BigBase 2010, White scores 54% and Black 46% on average. This does not matter in league chess if matches are played with an even number of boards. But matches with five boards each are not uncommon, so that one side has more Whites than the other. And in a match with an even number of boards, any default that is known in advance will be taken on the bottom (and even-numbered) board.
The problem with the toss is that the actual outcome tends to differ slightly from the predicted outcome. Theoretically, a coin will fall Heads 50% of the time. In practice, captains can find they either win or lose the toss a number of times in succession. So the advantage of having White on the odd boards tends not to be equally distributed.
The main advantage of a fixed rule is that it eliminates the randomness of the toss. It works where teams have home and away fixtures against each other teams, or where they only play each team once but have an equal number of home and away fixtures (this requires an odd number of teams in the division). In other cases, if the fixtures are drawn up correctly, the number of home and away fixtures will differ by no more than one. Another advantage of eliminating the toss is that matches are more likely to start on time.
One possible disadvantage of a fixed rule is that captains may be able to manipulate their board order so as to ensure that certain players were guaranteed to have White in every match. This was cited by one league as the reason for retaining the toss in its lowest division. However, leagues also tend to have a rule requiring teams to be in order of playing strength, or prohibiting players from playing on higher boards than anyone rated more than a set number of grading points higher than them. This should guard against foul play.
There are other ways of deciding colours, usually variants on the toss, for example drawing white or black pawns from a box (Central, in Scotland). In another league (Manchester), one of the usual methods applies but if both captains are absent at the relevant time, the first captain to arrive at the venue has the choice of colours.
As the table shows, one method is by far the most popular: the away team automatically has White on the odd boards.
Table 3
| Deciding colours | No. |
| Toss – winner chooses board colour | 24 |
| Toss – winner has White on odd boards | 11 |
| Away team has White on odd boards | 53 |
| Home team has White on odd boards | 9 |
| Miscellaneous | 6 |
| Information not available | 5 |
108 |
|
Default periods
Table 4 shows the amount of time allowed after the match starts before an absent player is defaulted. The shortest, and most common, period of time is 30 minutes. The longest is 1 hour 30 minutes (Worcestershire). Since the first time control in that league is also 1 hour 30 minutes, this amounts to saying that a player may turn up at any point before his time runs out.
The point of a shorter default period is to allow a player without an opponent to go home. Against this, late opponents have been known to turn up after the default period, generally for the reason that they experienced travel delays that were beyond their control. At least one league (Civil Service) extended its default period from 30 minutes to 45 minutes for this reason.
One would expect leagues with early starting times to have longer default periods, and clubs with later starting times to have shorter default periods, but this is not borne out by the survey. There seems to be no pattern to the distribution of default periods between different starting times.
Table 4
| Default periods | No. |
| 30 minutes | 52 |
| 40 minutes | 1 |
| 45 minutes | 10 |
| 1 hour | 28 |
| 1 hour 15 minutes | 1 |
| 1 hour 30 minutes | 1 |
| No provision | 2 |
| Information not available | 13 |
108 |
How games are concluded
Table 5 shows the frequency of the three arrangements for concluding games: adjournment, adjudication, and quickplay. In the survey I used "quickplay" for games either with an intermediate time control (e.g. 30 moves in 75 minutes and all remaining moves in a further 15 minutes) or without (e.g. all moves in 90 minutes). The quickplay element is after the intermediate time control, or in the later stages of an "all moves in X minutes" time control. A more accurate term for this kind of game would be "one session chess" or "single session chess", but quickplay is the term in use.
Some leagues incorporate an element of choice. One method is the primary or default method, to be used if the players cannot agree. Other methods, which one might call secondary methods, are available if both players agree. Other leagues operate a mandatory system for all games.
The most striking result in the survey is the adoption of quickplay by so many leagues. It is the mandatory or default option in 87 leagues out of 108 (i.e. about 80%). In almost all of those (77 out of 87), quickplay is mandatory: there is no alternative option. All these leagues must have decided that the advantages of quickplay (a guaranteed finish on the night, between the two players with no outside help) outweigh the disadvantages (having to move faster in the later stages of the game, and the risk of being hustled when short of time). To guard against the risk of hustling, many leagues incorporate into their rules the wording of the two-minute rule, which allows a player with less than two minutes on the clock to claim a draw if his opponent is not trying to win the game through the moves he makes on the board.
Opponents of quickplay are concerned that many players (generally the older ones) would stop playing in the league if it was adopted. That needs investigation: in the leagues that have adopted quickplay, what effect did that have on the number of players in their league?
At the other end of the scale, adjudication seems to be in terminal decline. It is the mandatory finish in only two leagues (East Lancashire, London Commercial) and the default finish in only two more (Civil Service, Mid-Sussex). It survives as a back-up in 15 other leagues.
Two leagues (Croydon & District, and Surrey) operate a mixed scheme. The away player offers two options out of the three, and the home player must choose one of those two. These means that both players can guarantee avoiding the method they like the least, but neither can guarantee getting the method they like the most. The Surrey website contains information about the actual choices made in most matches (although coverage in some divisions is patchy). In the 2009/10 season, out of 511 games for which this information is recorded, 48% chose quickplay, 41% chose adjudication, and 12% chose adjournment. As one might expect, the quickplay proportion is higher in the top division than in lower divisions.
Table 5
| Type of finish | M |
D |
MD |
S |
MDS |
| Adjournment | 0 |
15 |
15 |
11 |
26 |
| Adjudication | 2 |
2 |
4 |
15 |
19 |
| Quickplay | 77 |
10 |
87 |
16 |
103 |
| Mixed | 2 |
0 |
2 |
0 |
2 |
108 |
In the table, M = Mandatory, D = Default, and S = Secondary. MD = either Mandatory or Default, and this is the same as the total number of leagues. MDS adds up to more than that, because a number of leagues offer a choice of two methods rather than one as the secondary option, and each is counted separately.
Time controls
Tables 6 to 10 show the different time controls in use in each of the adjournment, adjudication and quickplay systems. The information is quite diverse. The main points seem to be:
- Quickplay leagues have a wider range of 1st time controls than other leagues (possibly because there are so many more of them).
- The most popular choice for the 1st time control is 35 moves in 75 minutes, followed by 30 moves in 75 minutes and 36 moves in 90 minutes.
- The longest 1st time controls tend to be for Saturday or weekend leagues.
- The rate of play up to the 1st time control ranges from 2 minutes a move to 3 minutes a move. Later time controls are similar, with some shorter exceptions.
- By far the most common quickplay finish (62 leagues out of 87) is all remaining moves in 15 minutes.
A total of 18 leagues operate the quickplay variant of all moves in X minutes (in most cases, this is 90 minutes). The rationale is that it makes the operation of the game simpler and there is no need to have an intermediate time control anyway. Against that, the discipline of an intermediate time control arguably helps players to budget their time better.
Finally, a Fischer time control is available as an alternative in three leagues (Croydon & District, Essex, Surrey Border). The time control is all moves in either 75 or 80 minutes, plus 10 seconds a move. Obviously, this depends on suitable digital clocks being available.
Table 6
| 1st time control | Rate |
A1 |
A2 |
Q |
Total |
| 28 moves in 60 minutes | 2:09 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 28 moves in 70 minutes | 2:30 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 30 moves in 60 minutes | 2:00 |
14 |
14 |
||
| 30 moves in 65 minutes | 2:10 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 30 moves in 70 minutes | 2:20 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 30 moves in 75 minutes | 2:30 |
2 |
23 |
25 |
|
| 30 moves in 90 minutes | 3:00 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 34 moves in 85 minutes | 2:30 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 35 moves in 70 minutes | 2:00 |
3 |
3 |
||
| 35 moves in 75 minutes | 2:09 |
5 |
7 |
23 |
35 |
| 36 moves in 75 minutes | 2:05 |
3 |
2 |
7 |
12 |
| 36 moves in 90 minutes | 2:30 |
12 |
4 |
6 |
22 |
| 37 moves in 75 minutes | 2:02 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 40 moves in 100 minutes | 2:30 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 40 moves in 120 minutes | 3:00 |
2 |
2 |
||
| 42 moves in 90 minutes | 2:09 |
4 |
4 |
8 |
|
| 42 moves in 100 minutes | 2:23 |
1 |
1 |
||
| 45 moves in 90 minutes | 2:00 |
1 |
1 |
||
| Information not available | – |
1 |
1 |
||
26 |
19 |
87 |
In the table, A1 = Adjournment, A2 = Adjudication and Q = Quickplay.
Table 7
| Later time control – Adjournment | Rate |
No. |
| 16 moves in 30 minutes | 1:53 |
1 |
| 24 moves in 60 minutes | 2:30 |
11 |
| 28 moves in 60 minutes | 2:09 |
7 |
| 35 moves in 75 minutes | 2:09 |
1 |
| 36 moves in 90 minutes | 2:30 |
4 |
| 42 moves in 90 minutes | 2:09 |
2 |
26 |
Table 8
| Later time control – Adjudication | Rate |
No. |
| 5 moves in 10 minutes (repeating) | 2:00 |
1 |
| 6 moves in 15 minutes (repeating) | 2:30 |
2 |
| 7 moves in 15 minutes (repeating) | 2:09 |
7 |
| 15 moves in 15 minutes (repeating) | 1:00 |
1 |
| Information not available | – |
8 |
19 |
Table 9
| Quickplay finish | Rate |
No. |
| All remaining moves in 15 minutes | – |
62 |
| All remaining moves in 20 minutes | – |
15 |
| All remaining moves in 25 minutes | – |
2 |
| All remaining moves in 30 minutes | – |
8 |
87 |
Table 10
| Quickplay – no intermediate time control | Rate |
No. |
| All moves in 80 minutes | – |
2 |
| All moves in 90 minutes | – |
12 |
| All moves in 95 minutes | – |
2 |
| All moves in 105 minutes | – |
1 |
| All moves in 120 minutes | – |
1 |
18 |
Conclusion
Based on these findings, the typical league is likely to have the following characteristics:
- Matches start at 19:30.
- The away team has White on odd boards.
- An absent player is defaulted 30 minutes after the start.
- There is a mandatory quickplay finish.
- The time control is either 30 or 35 moves in 75 minutes, followed by all remaining moves in 15 minutes.
Despite operating largely in isolation (or with the knowledge of what happens in nearby leagues), many leagues are taking the same decisions on a range of issues and moving towards a uniformity of provision. Some may regret this; others may accept it simply as the way that league chess has developed in recent years.
I hope the results of the survey will be useful to players and administrators as they continue to address these issues.
Alphabetical list of leagues
England |
Scotland | |
| 4NCL | Leeds | Ayrshire |
| Bedfordshire | Leicestershire | Central |
| Berkshire & District | Lincolnshire | Dumbarton & District |
| Birmingham & District | London | Edinburgh |
| Blackpool & Fylde | London Banks | Glasgow |
| Bolton | London Commercial | Lanarkshire |
| Bournemouth & District | Manchester | North East Scotland |
| Bradford & District | Merseyside | Scottish Borders |
| Bristol & District | Mid-Sussex | Scottish National |
| Buckinghamshire | Middlesex | Tayside & Fife |
| Bury & Rochdale | Norfolk | |
| Bury Area | North Circular | Wales |
| Calderdale | North Devon | East Glamorgan |
| Cambridge University | North Essex | Newport & District |
| Cambridgeshire | North Gloucestershire | Welsh Premier |
| Cannock & District | North Staffordshire & District | West Wales |
| Central Lancashire | Northamptonshire Silver King | |
| Chester & District | Northumbria | Northern Ireland |
| Chiltern | Nottinghamshire | Belfast & District |
| Civil Service | Oxfordshire | |
| Cleveland | Portsmouth & District | Republic of Ireland |
| Combined Banks & Insurance | Scunthorpe & District | Connaught |
| Cornwall | Sheffield & District | Leinster |
| Coventry & District | Shropshire | Munster |
| Croydon & District | Somerset | |
| Cumbria | South East Lancashire | |
| Darlington & District | South Tyne | |
| Derby & District | Southampton | |
| Devon | Southend & District | |
| Dorset | Stockport & District | |
| Dudley & District | Suffolk | |
| Durham | Surrey | |
| East Lancashire | Surrey Border | |
| Essex | Thames Valley | |
| Exeter & District | Thanet | |
| Hammersmith & District | Torbay | |
| Herefordshire | Warrington & District | |
| Hertford & District | Wiltshire | |
| Hertfordshire | Wirral | |
| Hillingdon | Wolverhampton & District | |
| Huddersfield & District | Wolverhampton Summer | |
| Hull & District | Worcester & District | |
| Kent | Worcestershire | |
| Lancaster, Morecambe & District | York & District | |
| Leamington & District | Yorkshire |
Downloads
These use shorthand, as in the following examples.
| 0h 30m | Default period of 30 minutes |
| 30/75 | 1st time control is 30 moves in 75 minutes |
| 6/15 R | Repeating time control of 6 moves in 15 minutes |
| // 24/60 | Later session is 24 moves in 60 minutes |
| All/15 | All remaining moves in 15 minutes |
| G 90 | All moves in 90 minutes |
| G 80 10 | All moves in 80 minutes + 10 seconds a move |
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