Why Liverpool vs. Chelsea kicked off at 5 a.m. in Korea: Britain just set its clocks back

Liverpool FC listed the Carabao Cup fourth-round tie at Anfield for Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 8 p.m. GMT.

Korea Standard Time runs nine hours ahead of GMT, so Wednesday 8 p.m. in England was Thursday 5 a.m. in Seoul. That's catch-the-first-half-before-work territory.

The UK sets its clocks back one hour at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October, which this year was Oct. 25. During British Summer Time (GMT+1), the gap with Korea is eight hours, so the same 8 p.m. kickoff would have landed at 4 a.m. in Seoul.

South Korea doesn't observe daylight saving time, so from Seoul, the gap only moves when the other country changes its clocks. Britain springs forward again on March 28, 2027, and the gap goes back to eight hours.

The U.S. falls back one hour on the first Sunday in November. Hawaii and most of Arizona stay on standard time year-round, so nothing changes there.

For the week in between, Europe and the U.S. are out of sync: London is four hours ahead of New York instead of the usual five. If you have a standing call with family or friends overseas, you may need to redo the math twice in two weeks.

In a 2014 Yale study, Erica Boothby, Margaret Clark and John Bargh had participants taste the same chocolate twice: once while the person beside them ate it too, and once while that person did something else. Without a word exchanged, people rated the shared bite as tastier. With bitter chocolate, the shared bite tasted worse. Good or bad, sharing turned it up.

A 2016 follow-up by the same group added a condition. They compared pairs who had met face to face in the lab with strangers, and pairs in the same room with pairs in separate rooms. The boost showed up only when the two felt close; simply being in different rooms was enough to make it disappear.

So knowing that crowds around the world are watching Anfield at 5 a.m. doesn't, by itself, make you feel like you're watching with anyone. By the study's logic, you'd need at least someone you feel close to, and physical distance on its own weakens that feeling.

Calls and live broadcasts need both people awake at once. With a nine-hour gap, someone is always up at dawn or in the middle of the night. Letters don't care. Your afternoon and their morning don't have to match.

That's where WorldWideSomeone, the app we're building, starts. It's a pen-pal app for sending anonymous letters to someone in another country. A courier carries each letter across the map, and you can't know exactly when it will land. You only become friends once a reply to your letter comes back, and from then on you can chat in real time. It's a design that tries to build the sense of closeness the 2016 study described through words exchanged rather than physical proximity. The study didn't show that this works; that's ours to find out.

The sample letter on the app's intro page asks, "What time is it where you are?" It's usually the first thing you ask someone far away. The app isn't in the app stores yet; we're getting ready to launch. Whether this design actually makes distance feel smaller is something we'll have to measure after launch, so we're not quoting any numbers now.