I have lost about 80 games by timeout. I have already written about it earlier - twice a vacation day was taken off when it shouldn't have been, leaving me with 0 left. However, I got some internet connection on my OTB tournaments, enough to save some of my games. I was sure the timeouts were going to stop at 70, as I played in all my games which had less than 38 hours on Wednesday, at 10pm. So I caclucalted that I have time until 12 on Friday (today):
2 hours until midnight
24 hours of Thursday
and 12 hours of Friday
= 38 hours.
So I log in today at 11 am, 37 hours later, and I see another 10+ games timed out, which should have 1 hour left? What's wrong???
That COULD be the case, yper, but it seems unlikely, since you get 36 more hours after making a move. Thus, when an opponent makes a move, you have AT LEAST 36 hours left in that game. So, to time out in such a game the sums of (time left before you made your last move) and (time between logging off and opponent made a move) must be less than 2 hours, which is very unlikely to happen in ten games at the same time.
I guess it's something else, although I have no idea what it could be. I try to always have a few vacation days left, and always make moves before there is less than a few hours left, just in case.
It happens. I lost all my Go games to timeout, and now I'm starting from scratch. No big deal, really, not much can be done about it. They're just games, after all. :)
Another possibility is that your games timed out before, you may have been in negative time but the server did not finish them because of the cron job issue. When the cron job restarts, all games finish at the same time. You see this happen from time to time if you watch the "Last five finished games" frequently, you can seen a list of 5 games finished in the same minute all by time.
The truth is you get always more time. A vacation day does not start the next day at the same time, but about half a hour later. And when you observe an opponent's game lost by timeout he always get nearly one hour courtesy. Like Aganju I have never lost on time, which is not that hard really, I don't see the benefit of being in near zero remaining time.
If I have internet connection just for a few minutes, and over 200 games in progress, it's very hard to keep much time. So I always count the time left until I get internet connection again, adding a few hours. This used to work for quite a long time, but now it didn't. And I'm sure I didn't make a mistake while counting.
Of course, OTB chess is a priority for me, but I always try to not time out. However, in Poland (and generally central/eastern Europe), Internet isn't so common in public places (hotels, restaurants, playing halls etc.). If every year I play at least 5-6 tournaments, each of them taking 10-11 days, there's no way I can save myself from timeouts...
Somar, do you have games set to keep showing the same kind of game until you've moved in all of them? Is it possible you got to games with enough time left in the kind you were looking at and still had games with less times in other categories?
Are you sure they weren't games that had hour when you made your last move, and your opponent made a move shortly after you logged off?
How does LG display the time left? I know in the forums it's often off by a bit of time when listing the "last post" in the main page. When it lists 1 hour, could it mean 1-60 minutes?
I think the real solution is to just try not to let your games get down that low. It can be difficult always crawling back, but if you're able to sustain games at ~38 hours, you should be able to sustain them at 200 hours. Get to the level of games you can comfortably play, and stay there. :)
Little Golem