What does 3+2 mean in chess?
3+2 means three minutes on the clock for each player, plus two seconds added to your own clock every time you complete a move. That is the whole rule. If you are asking what does 3+2 mean in chess because you saw it on a tournament entry form or in an online lobby, you are looking at a three-minute blitz game with a two-second increment.
The two seconds arrive when you press the clock, not before you move, so the bonus rewards finishing a move rather than thinking about one. Play forty moves and you will have been handed eighty extra seconds. In a long ending the increment keeps topping you up, which is exactly the point: needing a lot of moves is no longer, by itself, a reason to lose on time.
What does 3+2 mean in chess when you read the notation?
The notation is consistent across almost every site, clock and arbiter. The first number is minutes of base time. The second number is seconds of bonus per move. Nothing else is encoded.
- 3+2 and 3|2 are the same control written two ways. The vertical bar is house style, not a different rule, and some entry forms spell it out as “3 min + 2 sec”.
- 5+0 chess means five minutes each and no bonus at all. When the second number is zero, or missing entirely, the clock only ever counts down.
- 3 2 blitz, spoken aloud as “three two” or “three plus two”, is the same thing again.
One caveat worth knowing. The second number is almost always an increment, but some organisers use a delay instead, where the two seconds tick away before your main time starts falling and unused delay is not banked. Delay controls are normally spelled out — US events write a game in three minutes with a two-second delay as “G/3 d2” — precisely because a bare “3+2” is read as increment. If the difference is new to you, our guide to increment, delay and Bronstein lays out how each one behaves.
Why 3+2 in particular
3+2 is the reference blitz control. FIDE’s Laws define a blitz game as one where all the moves must be completed in a fixed time of ten minutes or less for each player, or where the allotted time plus sixty times any increment is ten minutes or less. Run 3+2 through that formula: three minutes plus sixty lots of two seconds is three minutes plus two minutes, so five minutes. Comfortably inside blitz.
It is also the control used for the blitz event of the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championship, and a common choice for rated blitz sections and club nights. Against 3+0, it is the version that keeps a won ending winnable.
The formula does real work. Base time plus sixty times the increment is how FIDE sorts a control into blitz, rapid or standard. It assumes a sixty-move game and asks how much time each player would have had in total. That is why 5+5 counts as blitz and 10+5 does not.
The controls you will actually meet, decoded
| Control | Each player gets | FIDE formula | Category | Typical home |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1+0 | 1 minute, no bonus | 1 min | Blitz by the Laws | Online bullet |
| 2+1 | 2 minutes, +1s per move | 3 min | Blitz by the Laws | Online bullet pools |
| 3+0 | 3 minutes, no bonus | 3 min | Blitz | Online blitz, casual club games |
| 3+2 | 3 minutes, +2s per move | 5 min | Blitz | FIDE World Blitz, rated blitz events |
| 5+0 | 5 minutes, no bonus | 5 min | Blitz | The classic club and park blitz game |
| 5+3 | 5 minutes, +3s per move | 8 min | Blitz | Rated blitz tournaments |
| 5+5 | 5 minutes, +5s per move | 10 min | Blitz, at the ceiling | Blitz events that want playable endings |
| 10+0 | 10 minutes, no bonus | 10 min | Blitz by the Laws, rapid on most sites | Online rapid pools |
| 10+5 | 10 minutes, +5s per move | 15 min | Rapid | Junior and club rapidplay |
| 15+10 | 15 minutes, +10s per move | 25 min | Rapid | FIDE World Rapid, weekend rapids |
| 30+0 | 30 minutes, no bonus | 30 min | Rapid | Older club rapidplay, no-increment clocks |
| 90+30 | 90 minutes, +30s per move | 120 min | Standard | Classical tournaments and title norms |
Two rows deserve a note. 10+0 sits exactly on FIDE’s blitz boundary, so the Laws treat it as blitz while Chess.com and Lichess file it under rapid. And 90+30 is usually played with a second stage: ninety minutes for the first forty moves, then thirty minutes for the rest, with the thirty-second increment running from move one. That is the standard FIDE tournament and title-norm control rather than the World Championship control, which has used slower schedules of its own. If multi-stage controls are unfamiliar, the full time control walkthrough covers how the extra time is added when the move count is reached.
How long does a 3+2 game take?
A forty-move game tops out at eight minutes forty seconds. There is no hard ceiling beyond that, because the increment keeps paying out for as long as the game runs. Here is the arithmetic, with nothing hidden.
- Base time: three minutes each, so six minutes of clock in total.
- Increment: a forty-move game means forty moves for White and forty for Black, which is eighty increments of two seconds. That is 160 seconds, or 2 minutes 40 seconds.
- Total if both players burn every second and the game ends on move forty: 6 minutes + 2 minutes 40 seconds = 8 minutes 40 seconds.
A sixty-move grind raises the ceiling to exactly ten minutes, since sixty moves each is 240 seconds of increment, four minutes, on top of the same six. Both players emptying their clocks is rare, and most games end well short of the ceiling. Budget ten to twelve minutes a round for a blitz round-robin and the schedule will hold.
What the two seconds change over the board
The practical difference between 3+2 and 3+0 is bigger than two seconds suggests. In 3+0 a rook ending can be lost by a player who is completely winning, simply because pushing the pieces around takes longer than the clock allows. In 3+2 the increment covers the cost of a move, so a technically won ending stays won as long as you keep moving at a steady pace.
Three habits follow from that. Play the obvious recapture instantly, because every fast move is a small profit. Do not shuffle pieces hoping to flag an opponent, since it no longer works. And in the ending, count on the increment rather than panicking: two seconds a move is enough to walk a king across the board once you have decided where it is going.
Flag falls still happen, and the rule for them is worth knowing. Under the FIDE Laws a player whose time runs out loses, unless the opponent could not checkmate that player by any possible series of legal moves, in which case the game is drawn. US Chess applies a narrower material test instead, so a lone king and two knights draws there while it can still win on time under FIDE. If you are choosing between speeds for a club night, the comparison in blitz, rapid and classical is a useful place to start.
Set a 3+2 clock now
You do not need hardware. Open the blitz timer, tap the 3|2 preset, and the two tap zones are live. Press your half when your move is finished and the opponent’s clock starts. It runs entirely in the browser, needs no account, and keeps working once the page is loaded even if the connection drops. Presets for 1, 3, 5, 10, 15|10 and 30 sit alongside it, and a custom builder handles the rest, including simple delay, Bronstein and two-stage tournament controls.
For over-the-board games away from a laptop, the same 3|2 preset is in our app on the App Store and Google Play, with Fischer increment, per-side move counters and a ten-second correction each way for when an arbiter has to fix the clock. The app plays increment only, so delay, Bronstein and multi-stage controls stay on the web clock. It is free to download, with a premium unlock after three start or pause presses.