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Antoine's idea for increasing $sparetime gave me another idea, which I went ahead and implemented. This idea is to treat $sparetime like an insurance policy. I've added a new time control, called Pace. When you set a pace, any player who maintains that pace has his reserve time protected against going below $sparetime. It works like this. At the end of a player's turn, so long as the player hasn't run out of time, a player's reserve time is compared with the spare time. If it is lower than spare time, and if that player is currently maintaining the desired pace, it is set equal to $sparetime. With this in play, there are two ways to run out of time. One is to fail to keep the pace and gradually use up one's remaining time. The other way is to delay moving so long that even having the full spare time isn't enough. What this insurance protects against is gradually running out of time while maintaining the desired pace. Here's an example of what I mean. Let's suppose that time controls are what I gave in my last message, and a player makes three moves each Sunday but never moves any other day. This player is keeping the pace of three moves a week, but the other time controls are such that he will gradually lose time. But by using $sparetime with pace setting, this player can maintain a reserve of 7 days even though the other time controls don't facilitate this. Fuller details are provided in the User's Guide.