The same game of chess feels completely different depending on how much time you have. With an hour on the clock you can calculate long variations and plan. With one minute you play on instinct, and the clock is as much your opponent as the person across the board. That amount of time is called the time control.
Each player has their own clock with a fixed amount of time for the whole game. Your clock runs only while it is your turn; the moment you move, it stops and your opponent’s starts. You can spend your time however you like — ten seconds on one move, three minutes on the next — but if your clock reaches zero, you lose on time, whatever the position on the board.
There is one exception. Under the official rules, if your time runs out but your opponent has no possible way to checkmate you — for example, they have only a bare king left — the game is a draw instead. A player cannot win on time a game they could never have won on the board.
FIDE, the International Chess Federation, sorts games by how much time each player has:
| Category | Time per player |
|---|---|
| Classical | 60 minutes or more |
| Rapid | more than 10 minutes, less than 60 |
| Blitz | 10 minutes or less |
Bullet is not an official FIDE category at all. It is the name online chess uses for games of under three minutes per player, and it is hugely popular online.
One boundary is worth knowing about. By FIDE’s rules, a game with exactly 10 minutes each counts as blitz. Online, the big chess sites treat 10 minutes as rapid instead — and so does Chess Thrill.
Many time controls add a small amount of time to your clock after every move you make. This is called an increment, and it is written after a plus sign: 3+2 means three minutes each, plus two seconds added after every move.
The increment changes the feel of a game more than its size suggests. Without one, a player who is winning can still lose simply by running out of time in a long endgame. With one, you can never be left with literally no time to make a move, as long as you move quickly.
To decide which category a game with increment belongs to, FIDE counts the base time plus sixty moves’ worth of increment. A 10+5 game, for example, counts as 10 minutes plus 60 × 5 seconds — 15 minutes in total — which makes it rapid.
The increment is also known as the Fischer increment, after Bobby Fischer, who patented a clock based on the idea in the late 1980s — the same Fischer of the Game of the Century. A similar feature had already appeared on an earlier digital clock, but it was Fischer who made it famous: his return match against Boris Spassky in 1992 was played with it, and today most top tournaments use it.
When you play online, you can choose between four time controls:
| Time control | Category |
|---|---|
| 1 minute | Bullet |
| 3 minutes | Blitz |
| 5 minutes | Blitz |
| 10 minutes | Rapid |
Each one has its own rating, so a good result at one minute never lifts or lowers your rating at ten. How the rating itself works is explained in How our rating works.
Against the bots you can also play with no clock at all, and that is the default when you first arrive — the best way to learn, because you can take as long as you need over every move.
When there is a clock, the bots take their time like a person would: around two seconds a move in most games, a little under that in one-minute games, and every so often a longer pause, as if the position needed a proper look. A bot that answered instantly would win on time even while playing badly. And as their own clock runs down, the bots speed up, so they don’t lose on time by thinking for too long.
If you are just starting out, begin with no clock against the bots, then move up to ten-minute games online. Speed comes by itself once the patterns are familiar.
Chess pieces: “cburnett” set by Colin M. L. Burnett, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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