How to programme a YS-902 smart timer for backgammon

The Gold Coast Backgammon Club is introducing playing with clocks to try to stop tournaments taking too long. It is also good practice for any tournament which requires clocks to be used – this is becoming more common.

 Many of us have the YS-902 Smart Timer clocks. They are arcane to programme, the instructions are from China and as usual, are pretty useless. They are really a chess clock, but this is focussing on Backgammon use, incorporating a delay before counting down. I am going to assume a 10 second delay with 12 minutes to play.

Turn on the device 2 clicks to the “beep” option, the sounds are helpful.

Press the up or down key until rule selecting symbol, the flashing dot, is to the right of delay. This indicates the mode we will be editing.

The big numbers (basic time) are the total time, the small numbers in the middle at the top (bonus/delay) is the delay. In the image above you can see the 12 minutes time and the 10 second delay.

Now to change the settings.

Hold the button confirm/reset button (2nd from left) for about 3 seconds until it beeps. Stupid programming, the screen doesn’t indicate you are in edit mode, but you are.

Press it again and the steps numbers will show 000.

Press it again and the big left hand 0 (hours) will start flashing. This is the point at which you can start adjusting times by using the up and down arrows. Assuming you don’t want your total match time to be over an hour, we need to move to the minutes (currently 12).

Press the start/pause button and the 12 starts flashing. Now you can adjust the minutes up or down using the up/down buttons. Once you have the number of minutes you want press start/pause button again to shift to the seconds. You can now adjust the number of seconds e.g. you want 12 minutes 30 seconds time.

Now comes a little bit of magic. Press the start/pause button again and it will jump to the delay, but helpfully, it makes the right hand clock match the left hand clock.

Adjust the delay up or down. As I said at the Gold Coast Backgammon Club we use 12 minutes with a 10 second delay.

So your clock should look like the image above, but something is still flashing because it is in edit mode.

Press the button confirm/reset button and the the steps numbers will show 000 again and everything stops flashing.

To save your settings now hold the confirm/reset button for 3 seconds, the timer will beep and you are ready to use the clock.

To start the clock in game mode, press the confirm/reset button so that the steps numbers show 000. Now press the start/pause button and the delay starts counting down. Press the start/pause button again to pause between games or if you need to have a break or whatever.  Press it again to restart the clock.

To reset for a new game, hold the confirm/reset button.