Timed play

Timed tournaments use a timer to determine the length of each half of a game. The timer is conventionally called a clock.

NAQT rules are the only rules currently in nationwide use that involve timing games. Middle school and high school games use nine-minute halves. Collegiate games officially use 10-minute halves, but in NAQT is experimenting with this: the 2018 Sectional Championship Tournaments will use untimed 11-cycle halves and the 2018 ICT will use 11-minute halves.

History

College Bowl used timed games. Evolution away from this began in the early 1990s, with only the most purist ACF events—such as the Georgia Tech MLK and ACF Nationals—being untimed. By the turn of the millenium, the only timed tournaments remaining were NAQT Sectionals and ICT, Stanford's Cardinal Classic, Michigan MLK, and Penn Bowl, plus of course all College Bowl-run events. Cardinal Classic dropped the clock starting in 2001, Penn Bowl in 2003, and MLK in 2006. In order to better simulate the ICT environment, the 2008 and 2009 FICHTE tournaments used the clock and NAQT's 2-second recognition rule.

Strategies

In general, teams playing a timed match will want to hurry if they want more tossups to be heard, or use as much time as possible if they want fewer tossups to be heard. Accordingly, a team will often hurry the game in two cases:

• The team is behind near the end of the game and needs to hear more tossups to improve its chance to come back.
• The team believes itself to be better than the other team, so hearing more tossups will reduce the likelihood of an upset.

Conversely, the other team will want to slow the game.

Under the CBI and pre-2008 NAQT rules, the half ended immediately when time expired in the middle of reading a tossup, unless a team buzzed before time expired and answered correctly (earning the team a bonus as usual in NAQT). This rule allowed a team with a small lead in the closing seconds of the game to preserve a victory with the clock-killing neg, preventing the other team from answering the tossup and getting a bonus. Since CBI is defunct and NAQT has changed its timing rules, the clock-killing neg is no longer a useful strategy.