New Chess Format Causes Time Trouble for Indian Players in Budapest

India's Vaishali Rameshbabu lost her opening match at the Total Chess pilot event in Budapest on the first day of a new fast classical chess format. ## What Happened Vaishali faced Frenchman Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, who held a rating advantage of 255 points over her. She fell into severe time trouble by the 23rd move, with under a minute left on her clock while her opponent had almost nine minutes. This time deficit proved too much, leading to a one-move blunder on the 34th move when she played king to e3 instead of pawn to b4. The other two Indian players in the 24-player field managed to draw their matches: R Praggnanandhaa against German grandmaster Vincent Keymer, and Arjun Erigaisi against Hans Niemann. ## Tournament Details The pilot event uses a fast classical format where players start with 45 minutes on the clock instead of the usual 90 or 120 minutes. Barely any players have experience with this format, except for Ian Nepomniachtchi who played it once in 2017. To cope with the strict time limits, some competitors chose to play their opening moves very quickly to save time for the middlegame. Fabiano Caruana, who defeated Hungary's Richard Rapport, noted that players tried to maintain a fast pace from the start. All players will face the same opponents again with reversed colors on Wednesday. ## Context Chess tournaments typically use traditional time controls that give players hours to think through deep strategic positions, which makes experimental faster formats a major challenge. Time management often dictates the outcome of high-level matches when players are forced to make complex calculations under extreme clock pressure.