Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - 11:05 (UTC -5)
Hi, Lynn:
We always report our Receive Date and the Postmark Date for each move.
If the postmark is unreadable or missing, we accept the player’s “Send Date” as written on the postcard. If the postmark is readable, that Postmark Date prevails. So it behooves us to know how our local postal service handles the mail so that there are no delays or differences between the day that we are mailing and when the postal service postmarks. That may even mean we must hand-deliver the postcard to our local post office and ask for the postcard to be hand-canceled and perhaps even take a photo of it with our phone.
Here in the USA, most Federal Holidays, e.g., the annual Presidents Day holiday in February, are “observed” on a Monday. That means no postal service. Our regular postal service is Monday through Saturday, inclusive, except Federal Holidays.
Let’s say you prepare a postcard to send a move on Saturday morning of Presidents Day Weekend and your Reflection Time for this move has been one day. If you don’t get to your local post office by closing time, perhaps 13:00 local time, that postcard is going to sit somewhere in the postal service until it gets processed and postmarked the following Tuesday. The correspondence chess rules say that your Reflection Time for this move is actually now four days instead of the one you thought you’ve spent and you just have to live with that. Most players are on the ball and make sure that their Send Dates match their Postmark Dates most of the time.
Your Move,
Michael