Arizona Chess
Sometimes, you have to sacrifice pieces to gain the advantage. Sometimes, to advance ... you have to fall back.
Sometimes, you have to sacrifice pieces to gain the advantage. Sometimes, to advance ... you have to fall back.
White Hat and Cueball are playing a timed game of tournament-style chess. At the start of the comic White Hat has the advantage because, as well as having one more pawn than Cueball, he has more time left to play his remaining moves — 6 minutes and 35 seconds, versus Cueball's 28 seconds, as shown on the chess clock display above them. This means that Cueball cannot afford to consider his moves as carefully as White Hat.
However, Cueball has an unexpected advantage. The building is sited across the border of Arizona with another state (or possibly with the Navajo Nation, which DOES observe DST, see Time in Arizona), with White Hat on the Arizona side, and the game is being played at a very particular time of year, when (most of) the United States exits Daylight Saving Time, which happens at 2:00 AM on the morning of the first Sunday in November. When this happens, clocks in those other states 'gain' an hour (i.e. they show that an hour less has passed than previously). As Arizona doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time (DST), clocks there continue to progress time as normal.
At this time, White Hat's time remains normal, but Cueball's time "falls back" one hour, giving him 60 additional minutes of play time. White Hat immediately protests, likely trying to communicate that this is not how chess clocks are meant to work. They are fancy timers, tracking how much time each player has used since the beginning of the match, and sometimes, depending on the rules of specific tournament, adding a specified increment of time every turn. They're not supposed to be based on local time, and changing the time remaining during play would certainly be a violation of the rules. Even clocks that do track local time are generally not so carefully calibrated that they would reliably switch times so close to a state line.
Using the changing local time rather than a monotonically increasing time is generally considered a bug when implementing systems like a chess clock. Most engineering libraries provide both, but the local time is much more complex to implement, and not usually included in a device as simple as dedicated hardware for a chess clock. It could be interesting to find an example of a microcontroller used in a chess clock here.
Cueball ignores these protests, and now seems confident of victory, since he has far more play time remaining. Daylight Slaying Time is a pun on Daylight Saving Time, but note that the comic takes place as the non-Arizona clock stops observing DST and joins the Arizona clock in Standard Time. A pun on Daylight Saving Time was also made in 673: The Sun.
The title text makes use of a pun. To "fall back" in a strategic sense means to withdraw from an attack, or even to retreat. This can be part of a valid strategy, as withdrawing from an engagement can consolidate your forces into a more defensible position or formation, allow you to press the attack elsewhere, at a more advantageous time and place, or draw enemy forces into an attack under circumstances that you control. "Spring forward, fall back" is a mnemonic used for daylight saving time; we advance the clock forward when entering DST in the spring, and move it backward when leaving it in the fall (autumn).
There are buildings in the US that are built across state lines (and county and city boundaries), and even some buildings that extend across international boundaries (these are known as line houses). The existence of these buildings can result in eccentric situations when laws and ordinances vary substantially between the locations. For example, a casino might be built on a state border where gambling is legal in one state but illegal in the other. In such a case, the gaming can only happen on one side of the building (the other side being reserved for other services and functions). It's not uncommon for businesses and tourist attractions to lean into the novelty of this by demarking the boundary inside the building and specifically encouraging things that are legal only on one side of the line. Such situations are likely the inspiration for this strip, but using such a line to manipulate a competition based on time zone is highly unlikely.
Ongoing state-level efforts to end time changes could also increase the number of places where this situation could happen, as more DST/non-DST boundaries arise.
The comic was published five days before the start of the World Chess Championship 2024 in Singapore.