Online Chess Clock Stopwatch Timer
Interactive JavaScript Chess Clock with adjustable timer and many useful features. Press the Space bar to get started and to switch the player.
- Space - Start the timer and swap player.
- Shift - Pause the clock.
- R - Reset.
- N - New game: swaps the black and white sides and resets the clock.
- B - Set bonus seconds for each swap.
- Ctrl + - Zoom in window
- Ctrl - - Zoom out
- The names and the current times can be edited as regular input fields.
Chess Clock Rules
Chess clocks are usually two adjacent analog or digital timers with two buttons that players press after they move a piece on the chess board.
They were first introduced in 1883 and their purpose is to speed up the game ensuring none of the players spends too much time thinking and delaying the move. These game clocks can be used for other two-player board games such as Shogi, Go and Scrabble.
"Sudden death", in which players must make a predetermined number of moves in a certain amount of time or forfeit the game immediately. A particularly popular variant in informal play is fast chess, in which each player is given a short time (e.g. five minutes) on the clock in which they have to play the entire game.
Timing Methods
There are 3 types of common chess timing methods:
- Bonus, also known as Fischer or Increment where a specified amount of time is added for each move (usually 30 seconds). You can set this with the Bonus button which will trigger an input field to set the desired time in seconds.
- Bronstein delay is similar to the previous one but the maximum amount is not added all the time. For example if the delay is 10 seconds and a player uses 10 seconds or more for a move, 10 seconds is added after they complete their move. If the player uses 5 seconds for a move, 5 s is added after they complete their move. This way the base time left on the clock can never increase even if a player makes a fast moves.
- Simple delay, countdown or US delay is the most commonly used in the USA and it's mathematically the equivalent of the Bronstein delay. For example if the delay is 10s, the clock waits for 10 seconds each move before the timer starts counting down.
Read more on Wikipedia