From: Patrick Davin <patrick <at> LYRA <dot> VEGA <dot> OR <dot> JP>
Date: 10 jul 1997
Subject: Re: Byo Yomi (was European Style of playing shogi)

Colin Paul Adams writes:
>I have never seen the point of byo yomi at all. Especially in
>tournaments where you play more than one game per day, it seems
>simplest to me just to have a single fixed time period in which to
>play all your moves. Then it is up to each individual player to manage
>their own time according to personal preference.

One major advantage of byoyomi over sudden death time controls:
Byoyomi discourages a player who is dead lost on the board
from playing on in the hope of winning on the clock.

(Instead, he might play on in the hope that his nervous opponent
will blunder as the seconds tick away.  In my opinion, this is
"less bad", as more games are decided "on the board.")

Having said this, most amateur tournaments in Japan are
sudden-death; only some major ones use byoyomi.  This is
probably due to a shortage of byoyomi clocks more than
anything else.  Sudden-death is more convenient for the
organizer and generally doesn't distort results (or cause
disputes, as it does in chess) enough to be a problem.