Q: What is Fischer/incremental time control and how does it work?

A: When using regular time control (NN days per move), each player has the fixed number of days to make each move and the clock is restarted after each move is made. With the Fischer/incremental time control, each player has a time bank that is never restarted, but instead extra time is added to it after each move. It is much closer to the way how the real chess clock works when playing over the board, yet it is also very suitable for correspondence-style chess.

For example, if you are playing a game with "5d + 1d < 10d" time control, that means you have 5 days to make your initial move. And then +1 day is added to your clock after you make your move on top of whatever time you had on the clock at the time. And that's how much time you will have to make your next move after your opponent makes theirs. And so on and so forth. Returning to our example, say, you made your first move 12 hours after the game was started, so you will have 5 days - 12 hours + 1 day = 5 days 12 hours to make your next move (after your opponent makes theirs).

To avoid huge amounts of time accumulated by players, there is a limit on how many days you can have maximum (denoted by the "<" symbol). If the accumulated time exceeds this number, it will be reset to the maximum (i.e. 10 days in our example).

Needless to say, this time control was invented (and later patented) by Bobby Fischer.

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