Checker Hold

A checker hold is a period of time during each tick that no tasks are being processed by the checker, and thus no connections are open to the teams' services that might be interrupted by a restart.

The motivation for a time window with no traffic comes from the fact that some scoring formulas rely on large SLA for disincentivizing metagame tactics. This puts a large burden on players who patch their service, since they risk losing one round of SLA - or more if flags could not be placed due to the downtime.

Since checker task scheduling is unpredictable by design, patching without a guarantee is inherently unfair and does not properly measure skill.

In practice, the number of game rounds far exceeds the amount of rounds of SLA a team would lose due to patching, and since all teams are equally subject to the randomness of the checker, it only needs to be considered for high-stakes competitions.