10 Tips To Cure Your Time Trouble Addiction In Chess
From recognising critical moments to facing your fears
1. Save your time for critical positions
If you’re prone to falling into time trouble, you’re probably spending too much time in positions where you shouldn’t be. You should spend more time in positions where the value of finding the best move is large, and vice versa.
The most critical type of positions are called ‘critical moments’:
GM Jacob Aagaard, in Thinking Inside The Box:
The critical moment is when the difference between the best and the second-move is half a point or more.
GM Pavel Eljanov, in a Pro Chess Training session in January 2022:
The critical moment is when you have to make a critical choice: whether to keep playing statically or dynamically, some exchange or drastic change of pawn structure, sacrifices etc.
Critical moments are challenging because they require deeper calculation/evaluation. Often, when we burn too much time early on, we don’t have enough time to adequately navigate critical moments later, blunder and lose the game.
Your first step is knowing when a position is critical.
Which leads us to:
2. Know the different types of positions
Most positions require decisions that aren’t critical.
Aagaard categorises these as follows:
Automatic Decisions: Moves you can play quickly, such as opening preparation, the only legal move, recapturing. Of course, you have to make sure you’re not remembering things wrongly or assuming something is forced when it isn’t.
Simple Decisions: You can mostly rely on your intuition for these moves. The difference between the best move and the second-best move is not so serious. His ‘three questions’ can be a good guide in these positions: 1. Where are the weaknesses? 2. What is my opponent’s idea? 3. Which is the worst placed piece?
Strategic Decisions: Commonly misinterpreted as being the same as ‘positional’. These are more ‘long-term’ positional decisions that might defy some of the more obvious positional maxims. You can’t make them with calculation alone or by positional evaluations with a low-level candidate check.
In general, the more critical a position is, there are:
more choices
bigger differences between the choices
limits on how far you can get with intuition and surface considerations alone.
3. Don’t always rely on calculation
Another common issue is trying to solve everything with calculation, even when there is nothing to really calculate. The position demands, say, that you develop a piece or exchange a piece while you still have the chance. But your instinct might be to jump right into some long, forcing variations when they might not even lead anywhere.
Calculating is useful in most positions to see what both sides are trying to do and what options are at both sides’ disposals. Depending on the position, though, there could be other positional/strategic/abstract/practical considerations that you should think about first.
4. Improve your thought process
How we think is a behemoth of a topic. In the context of time management, a lot of us waste too much time over the board thinking about things that
don’t really matter
don’t help us understand the position any better
don’t help us figure out what we should focus on or play.
Former World Champion, GM Vladimir Kramnik advised in his Thinking in Chess course to choose a move at the board systematically, asking in this order:
Can I win directly?
IF you can take a piece without any punishment, why would you bother calculating variations or think about strategy?
Is my opponent threatening anything?
Whether it is asking yourself whether anything is hanging on the beginner level, or whether we are talking about the subtle threat at the higher level, the existence of a threat makes your choice limited as you should deal with it instead of thinking about long-term factors or planning or strategy.
What is my opponent going to do next?
The most important question when it comes to finding the best move. I insist you should consider this question BEFORE you consider what YOU want to do.
It’s useful to try different systems to structure your thinking. Finding the right one will save you time and improve the quality of your thinking over the board. We all have our default way of thinking, so it might take a while to absorb something new.
5. Use your opponent’s time wisely
In an ideal world, you’d focus just as hard in your opponent’s time, thinking about their likely moves and preparing your responses. If you’ve already worked out what to play against something they end up playing, you can blitz it out and save time!
In reality, you tend not to think as hard during your opponent’s time. Unless you’re the fittest chessplayer in the world, it would drain your energy to keep it up.
I’d say a lot of people think too little on their opponent’s turn. After you’ve played your move, you might be someone who gets up and walks around.
While this might be good for you to mentally reset a little and rest your mind, in some positions, your energy would be best spent continuing to concentrate at the board.
GM Noël Studer wrote in his post, How To Avoid Time Trouble In Chess:
I am only allowed to stand up from my board if I know the reply to my opponent’s most logical move.
So whenever you have the instinct to leave your board, ask yourself: am I sure of my reply to his most logical move?
If you can answer it with yes (and then also play that move in less than a minute!) then you are allowed to leave the board.
Another strategy you can try is to focus on the bigger picture in your opponent’s time: plans, positional/strategic considerations, exchanging etc.
These aren’t as exhausting as calculating.
When you have more clarity on these aspects, it’ll help save you time on your move.
6. Don’t be scared of trusting your gut
If you’re a time trouble addict, you might be scared of trusting your intuition/instincts.
You want clarity. You feel compelled to check what your intuition suggests with logic and calculation, even for moves that can’t be verified with those tools.
You’re scared of not being in control. There might be a move you want to play, but because you can’t explain why, you’d rather play another move you can explain, or might look more natural.
Ultimately, you want to stay in your comfort zone. But at a certain point, when your old ways of doing things aren’t helping you improve, you need to confront these fears. Play the moves you feel like you should—and keep doing it, even if the results aren’t always good. If you don’t let these ideas play out in reality, you’ll keep regretting it.
7. Don’t be scared of making mistakes
Another common fear is the crippling fear of playing bad moves/making mistakes and losing the game. You tend to be too pessimistic and overestimate a few things:
the damage one move will do to your position
your opponent’s ability to punish your moves/decisions
how much actually losing the game will matter in the long run.
Bad time management can be a self-fulfilling prophecy in this regard:
We fear mistakes, so we spend extra time checking everything
Because we spend too much time checking, we get low on time
Because we’re low on time, we end up making a mistake.
Analyse your games, and if you have too many mistakes due to time trouble, then it’s clear that you have to save more time for later, and gather data on the quality of your play as you implement strategies to play faster.
For psychological solutions, Studer’s post I linked above is worth a read.
8. Visualise your ideal time management
It can be useful to have a general plan of how much time you still want to have after the opening, in the early/late middlegame, endgame etc., or after x number of moves. FM Nate Solon wrote about it in his post, Time Management:
A schedule like this helps you manage your time proactively throughout the game. If you get behind, you know you need to speed up, or else face a near certain time scramble later on.
If you struggle with time management you can personalise this further and try to improve on your previous tournament/s. Record the time you have left after your moves throughout the game and examine it in the context of points #1–#7 above.
Look at which moves you spent the most time on. Were the meditations justified?
Look at where you got into time trouble. Where could you have improved your time management earlier in the game?
What kind of positions, or moves, cost you a lot of time?
How was the quality of your moves after you got into time trouble? Would you have played significantly better than the game if you had more time?
9. Observe how stronger players use their time
As with any area of chess, you can learn by comparing yourself with stronger players.
If you lost against a stronger player and have time to analyse or discuss the game, you can ask them which positions they thought were critical or where they think you went astray. It’s easy to focus on the blunders or missed opportunities when you go over the game with an engine, but the practical differences often appear in the perceptions and handling of quieter positions and ‘simple decisions’.
You can also record your opponent’s moves if you really want to knuckle down on examining time management—useful for serious cases of time trouble addiction.
If you have a coach, you can ask them for their thoughts on particular positions and moves in terms of how long they would take or whether they think it is a critical moment, what they might focus on first if they were playing in your shoes.
You can do serious training while spectating games in person or online—put yourself in one of the player’s shoes, and think like it’s actually your game. You can not only compare your moves with the player, but also how much time you spend before coming to each decision.
10. Confront your perfectionism
GM Jonathan Rowson wrote about time trouble in The Seven Deadly Chess Sins which include Perfectionism. He wrote about 18 (!) causes of time trouble and their remedies.
Just because you haven’t been exposed to a type of position before, doesn’t mean that you can’t play it well. All I can recommend in such situations is the courage to go ahead, because only by embracing new territory do we learn new things.
GM John Nunn: Chess is all about making decisions. Postponing a decision doesn’t necessarily improve it. Try to get into the habit of asking yourself: “is further thought actually going to be beneficial?” Another question to ask is: “is this problem solvable, and if so how long it will take me?” Often the answer will be no, in which case you just have to make a good guess; and if the answer is yes, but it will take a long time, you have to gauge whether you can afford the time to work it out, because it might just be more practical to guess.
Deep thinks may not be such a crime, but you should be careful how you begin your long think and be sure to make room for variety instead of starting on a difficult line and getting ‘stuck’ there for several minutes. So if you do feel that a long think is required, make a mental note of what you aim to achieve and a mini strategy for how you will go about it.
Perfectionism can appear in different forms:
thinking that a mistake in time trouble is excusable compared to other mistakes
you get a thrill out of playing while low on time, or you subconsciously burn your time because you’ve scored some memorable wins in time scrambles
you waste time regretting moves that were played in an earlier part of the game
If you fall into time trouble often, the earlier the better to dig into the causes and come up with a plan to tackle them. The longer you let time trouble be a constant in your chess, the more entrenched your unhealthy habits will become. Chronic time trouble hampers and debilitates your potential in the long run, as you will inevitably lose many games because there are serious problems in your game.
Mistakes are inevitable—but time management can be improved with hard work.
For how to navigate time trouble, you can read my post on it here.
Ah, the fickleness of mankind, so niggardly with the little time they have to live, always complaining that their lives are short, leaving behind only the hushed hiss of effervescence, yet they are impatient for these minutes to pass, such is the strength of hope.
—José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Thnx, nice overview.
It's reassuring to know I'm not the only one overthinking things out there