I'm loving these recaps. I have a tournament in a few weeks, and reading these feels like great preparation.
Patience is a chess skill that I really need to work on. I used to think that my lack of patience came from being uncomfortable with tension. But reflecting on this more, I wonder if it stems mainly from poor time management. I often reach a point in my games where I feel like I'm getting too low on time to be patient any longer, and I need to quickly transition to the final phases of the game before I start blundering.
Any advice? How do you ensure that you're moving fast enough to conduct the whole game patiently?
The idea that time trouble is related to impatience makes sense - all my recent tournaments have been played at G/90+30s increment, so there's not a lot of time left in the endgame. This tournament I've been routinely making it to move 30 with around 35 minutes on the clock, which is a nice cushion. That's significantly faster than I was playing in my last few tournaments, when I usually had 15-20 minutes at move 30, and sometimes as little as 7-8. I think I've been able to speed up because I'm focusing on concrete positional operations that don't take long to figure out rather than aiming for lots of tactical complications. That said, it could also be a product playing pretty far down each round so far and getting comfortable positions with clear plans.
Recently I've mainly played G/60; d5, which is obviously kind of fast. This upcoming tournament is 40/80, SD/30; d30. That 30-second delay might be especially helpful for calming my concerns about blundering late in the game.
Being intentional about how many minutes to spend on a move makes sense. Maybe especially once I'm deciding between a small number of candidate moves, it's worth asking how much time I should spend deciding between them.
G/60 (and G/45) is really hard to manage. If you're playing blitz or rapid, you know that you're just playing fast, with occasional thinks at critical moments. Longer time controls with d30 are very comfortable - at worst you can play on the increment indefinitely. But that in between stuff - you've gotta play good moves, but there's no way to predict how much time you need to leave for future problems.
What's the time control? I've always helped refocus on time management by coming up with a minutes/move baseline and checking in with it (e.g. 3m/move if time control is 120 for the first 40 moves - yeah, I know, old time control). Of course, sometimes you just need to think a long time (not if you're playing Andy Lee 2024 (TM) chess) but this has always (when I've done it) helped me be cognizant of budgeting my time.
I'm loving these recaps. I have a tournament in a few weeks, and reading these feels like great preparation.
Patience is a chess skill that I really need to work on. I used to think that my lack of patience came from being uncomfortable with tension. But reflecting on this more, I wonder if it stems mainly from poor time management. I often reach a point in my games where I feel like I'm getting too low on time to be patient any longer, and I need to quickly transition to the final phases of the game before I start blundering.
Any advice? How do you ensure that you're moving fast enough to conduct the whole game patiently?
The idea that time trouble is related to impatience makes sense - all my recent tournaments have been played at G/90+30s increment, so there's not a lot of time left in the endgame. This tournament I've been routinely making it to move 30 with around 35 minutes on the clock, which is a nice cushion. That's significantly faster than I was playing in my last few tournaments, when I usually had 15-20 minutes at move 30, and sometimes as little as 7-8. I think I've been able to speed up because I'm focusing on concrete positional operations that don't take long to figure out rather than aiming for lots of tactical complications. That said, it could also be a product playing pretty far down each round so far and getting comfortable positions with clear plans.
Recently I've mainly played G/60; d5, which is obviously kind of fast. This upcoming tournament is 40/80, SD/30; d30. That 30-second delay might be especially helpful for calming my concerns about blundering late in the game.
Being intentional about how many minutes to spend on a move makes sense. Maybe especially once I'm deciding between a small number of candidate moves, it's worth asking how much time I should spend deciding between them.
G/60 (and G/45) is really hard to manage. If you're playing blitz or rapid, you know that you're just playing fast, with occasional thinks at critical moments. Longer time controls with d30 are very comfortable - at worst you can play on the increment indefinitely. But that in between stuff - you've gotta play good moves, but there's no way to predict how much time you need to leave for future problems.
What's the time control? I've always helped refocus on time management by coming up with a minutes/move baseline and checking in with it (e.g. 3m/move if time control is 120 for the first 40 moves - yeah, I know, old time control). Of course, sometimes you just need to think a long time (not if you're playing Andy Lee 2024 (TM) chess) but this has always (when I've done it) helped me be cognizant of budgeting my time.