The Grand Chess Tour 2017 events use delay, not increment, according to event regulations.
Have the organizers made an official statement as to why, or is there a consensus on what the unofficial reason is?
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Maybe it is a plan to make Caruana suffer? Nah, it probably has to do with the fact that delays don't give the players a chance to gain time on the clock, which will increase the likelyhood of a decisive result.– ScoungedCommented Jun 23, 2017 at 7:11
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Indeed, delays don't allow you to gain time, which guarantees an "eternal" extreme time trouble once the time drops to mere seconds. I suppose they find that more entertaining to watch (but it's not so fun for the players...).– TMMCommented Jul 9, 2017 at 2:11
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1 Answer
As literally everyone hated this pseudo-novelty, Grand Chess Tour reacted on some guy's tweet 'I see! I imagine the results are more decisive with the delay?'. GCT answered that 'Yes and increment is confusing for spectators who aren't familiar with chess clocks', which is ridiculously wrong. I had a much harder time explaining this strange delay rule to my non-chess-players colleagues than to explain them the simple increment one. I am not even sure I understand it properly myself, and I guess I am not the only one.
Another suggestion was that replacing increment with delay would limit the amount of time a game can last. But you could simply switch to 3min+2s if that is the real goal. I think the real goal behind that was to try to get the tournament to a format acceptable for TV broadcast, which is obviously what all tournament sponsors are dreaming of (money money).
But the most likely reason was to catch the players in situation they aren't familiar with and create time trouble, to make the games and results more spectacular and decisive. Again, that serves the goal of making the sport more exciting to the global audience to hope for TV broadcast.
See this article from chess24 where they discuss on this (point number 4)
