I first ran into hourglass timing in the baduk community.
Normally, you start the game with equal amounts of sand in both bulbs of the hourglass. During your turn, you have the top bulb, and when you end your turn you rotate the glass so the precious time sands starts running back to you, since you have the lower bulb during the opponent’s turn.
One problem has been that to set up the timers, you need to take pretty much half of the total time. So with a 5 minute glass, it takes 2½ minute to reset it.
Today I came up with this variant:
Start the game with the hourglass placed between the players with the bulb that has the most sand on top. There can be any sand ratio, it doesn’t have to be in the middle nor all in one end. Any ratio is fine.
Before there has been any claims, turns are defined by the moves on the board. If you’ve made your move and let go, it’s your opponent’s turn.
During your opponent’s turn, you can claim the currently lower bulb is yours (which means that the upper bulb belongs to your opponent). Just say “I claim the glass”. This can happen once per game.
After the glass has been claimed, you’ve got to end your turn (after making moves on the board like normal) by flipping the hourglass so that your side is lowest.
There can only be one claim made per game. So there are gonna be a couple of turns where the hour glass doesn’t belong to anyone and the sand just runs in one direction. Then after the claim is when you start flipping it back and forth.
You lose when your bulb is empty. So during your turn, your bulb is on top and you risk it running out.
If, at the start of the game, you can’t agree on which side has the most sand, that’s perfect actually. Just have each player claim the bulb that they think has the least, right from the start of the game.
Otherwise, if both players agree one side is more empty (whether it’s somewhat more empty or entirely empty doesn’t matter), start the game with that side as the lower side. The bulbs will start evening out, and once a player thinks the bottom bulb has more during an opponents turn, they can claim it as theirs.
By the way, for Baduk specifically, according to European rules you can normally pause the clock for removing captured stones as long as you’re removing at least three stones (or at least two stones with American rules). So if you’re just capturing a single stone, you can’t flip the glass until you’ve removed that stone. If you’re capturing many stones, that’s when you can place the glass on its side after placing your capturing stone. This goes for any time control, not just hourglass, but it does not apply in every tournament—check with your director.