Chess clock

How to use it over the board

Choose a time control and press Start. The clock takes over the screen and turns sideways, so the two faces sit side by side with a press bar each — the shape of a tournament clock, stood beside the board where both players can read both times at once. Nothing else is reachable while it is up: the back arrow in the center column is the only way out, and the phone’s own back gesture does the same thing rather than dropping you out of the page mid-game.

Each player presses their own half the moment they have finished moving — the same motion as a physical clock, where you press with the hand that moved the piece. If you would rather lay the phone flat between you than stand it beside the board, turn on Flip Black’s face and the far clock reads correctly from the other side. The space bar does the same job as a press when the device is a laptop.

Pause stops both clocks — for an arbiter call, a disputed position, or a genuine interruption — and neither side loses time while it is stopped. Leaving the clock with the back arrow pauses it too, so time cannot quietly drain while you are changing a setting.

Increment or delay: pick the one your event uses

Increment (Fischer) credits you a fixed amount after each completed move, so moving quickly builds a reserve and a game can never end with both players shuffling on the half-second. Delay (Bronstein or simple US delay) holds your clock still for a few seconds at the start of your turn: you cannot accumulate time, only avoid burning it on an obvious recapture.

The practical difference shows up in the endgame. With a 30-second increment, a rook ending is playable to the end and technique decides it. With a 5-second delay, the same ending becomes a race the better-prepared player wins. Set the clock to whatever your club actually uses, because practicing a control you never play is how you end up in time trouble in the one game that counts.

Why the tournament split matters

A control written as 40/90 + 30 means 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, then a further 30 minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30-second increment throughout. Anything you did not spend in the first period carries forward — the second allowance is added to what is left, not swapped for it.

That structure changes how the game is played. Move 40 is a real cliff, and the standard club disaster is spending 25 minutes on move 33 and then having to find moves 34 to 40 on the increment. The clock here counts the moves within the period for you, so the number that matters is on the screen rather than in your head.

Time trouble is a pattern, not bad luck

Most players who lose games on the clock do not spend their time evenly. They spend it in two or three places — usually early, on a position that theory or general principles already answer — and then play the genuinely difficult middlegame at ten seconds a move. The clock feels like the problem; the distribution is the problem.

Timing your over-the-board games is the first step to seeing that, because it gives the habit somewhere to show up. If you want the same picture from games you have already played, our guide to chess time management works through the per-move clock data and what the common patterns look like.