There has been mentions of posters getting in to time pressure in various threads recently so I figured it might be useful to have some sort of a thread were people would post tips on how to manage your time properly during a game.

Below are some tips that I've received/overheard/read about during my chess "career". They are not some definite truth, take it all with a grain of salt and if you don't agree with them, speak up Here goes, NOT in order of importance, just numbered to make it easier to follow.

1. Pay close attention to your clock at ALL times.

This sounds pretty simple, but don't be fooled - I can remember countless occurrences where my students would pay no attention to their clock in the opening, explaining it with something like "well but I do have like two hours left at that stage, I don't really have to worry about it!". Indeed, you don't have to "worry" per se, but you cannot completely ignore it and spend 35 minutes on move 7 just cause you have a lot of time left. Now by the time it's move 25 and you really need to take some time, you realize that you don't have any left!

2. Do not waste time when not necessary.

Again, pretty simple, but people still do it all the time. Now what do I mean by not necessary? For example in some very sharp tactical position your opponent captures your piece - very often, it is wise to spend at least a minute or two before recapturing to see whether there are some intermezzo's and stuff like that - that is definitely not a waste of time.

Now imagine that you play some random line with white including Bg5 pin, your opponent plays h6, you play Bh4, he plays g5, and you don't have any sacs available, you only have one move, Bg3 - make the damn move immediately. If you write down your opponent's "g5", clean your glasses, take a sip of your water and then play Bg3, I can congratulate you - you just wasted a minute of your time. You can do all of those things after playing your move, so why not save that minute?

3. Make opening decisions BEFORE the game, not OTB.

This requires some explanation. I am not talking about those instances where you get surprised by your opponent - then definitely take your time. Just recently I was watching one of my students play a game, he was white in the Sicilian Najdorf, 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6. In this position, he plays 6. Bg5 about 95% of the time, with remaining 5% divided between 6. Be3 and 6. Be2. I kid you not, he spent more than 5 minutes in that position and ended up playing 6. Bg5. After the game, I asked him what he was thinking about, and he said he was trying to decide which one he should play.

WRONG! You have to make those decisions before the game. "Against Najdorf I will play 6. Bg5, against the French I will play 3. Nd2, etc." It makes your life so much easier it's not even funny. The thing is, in situations as described above, you will play your regular move like 99% of the time, which means that you just wasted five minutes which you could have used when your opponent actually surprised you on move 14 or something..

4. Minimize your losses

From my personal experience, this one is crucial. Imagine some complicated middlegame position. You spend 30 minutes trying to calculate some complicated line but you are hitting a brick wall and not making any progress for past 10 minutes, basically just going over the same line over and over and over in your head without finding anything.

STOP IMMEDIATELY! What is likely happening, is you turning your tunnel vision on, which definitely won't lead to anything good. There are two solutions - either pull "the Tal" and go to that line based on your intuition, or abandon the line all together and try to have a fresh look at the position. If you haven't found anything in those 30 minutes, it is extremely unlikely that you will suddenly find something if you spend 10 more minutes on it, so don't waste your time.

***NOTE*** Use this rule of thumb only in those instances where you are not making any progress in your calculations. If you are making progress, you can try to keep going as long as you think you can spare time to do so.

There is definitely something else that I am forgetting now, will try to remember more. Please, any constructive input is very welcome

Great post, very well done. Extremely informative and helpful. I agree with everything you posted, particularly the piece of advice about not wasting time in the opening. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten into a complicated middlegame only to wish I had more time that I wasted in the opening.

Another piece of advice I've gotten and found to be very true is don't waste time calculating unnecessary variations. Here's an example of what I mean. Let's say you're in more of a strategic type position without many available tactics. There's no point in trying to calculate variations to a forced win because there is no immediate forced win. The other side likely has several good available replies so you'll just waste time trying to calculate everything out. If you know your play should come on the queenside for example, find a move that furthers your plan and play it. Of course a quick blunder check is necessary, but beyond that don't waste time. Note that I'm not saying to just play a random move. Certainly use the time required to find a move that suits the strategic aims of a position, but don't spend too much time past that. Save your time for when the position does become critical and tactical in nature.

When your opponent is in time trouble: Take your time. Don't panic and start blitzing just because your opponent is.

That's my very common mistake :/ I'm usually very bad at time trouble, and even worse - I start to panic when my opp has significant time advantage. Just I know, that I suck on time trouble, and start to "do everything to reduce that time disadvange"... leading to positional disadvantage usually

But also I tend to play very fast and bad (just because I suck at blitz - look above ) when villain is already blitzing Ofc, because of all the circumstances my games are 15/0 control, and "blitz" is usually when a couple of minutes are left But still - I still need to work on this, especially on psychology side

Good post, YKW

I dont agree with Nr3.
This can only be done if you know who your opponent is and what openings he/she plays.

Nr 4 is extremely important, especially if the time control is 30 min for the rest of the game after the first time control.

5. Only try to find the next move

not the complete way till the mate.

I will give two examples from my recent games:


I have white and if I'd just think from move to move, I probably would have won easily by:
1. f6 (the obvious move+coffin nail) Qg4 (what else)
then
2. Qd2 Qh5
3. Nf4!
and black has the take knight, as otherwise something like (3.-Qg4, 5.Be2 Qf5 6. Ne6!) happens
but after 3.- Bxf4 we can just take and have an easy won position.

[there are also a lot of other ways to win the position]

But instead of just making the obvious 1. f6 after maybe at most 3mins,
I tanked >= 20mins, trying to calculate everything (obviously I missed moves like 6. Ne6, a move I will see when the position is on board, but not 6 moves before that), didn't find a forced win and now tried instead
1. Rf3 f6
2. Nf4 Kh7
tanked again, still not finding a forced win
3. Ng6 Rd8
now tanked again for >20 mins, and thought I would have found a forced win
4. Ng5??
in sacrificing a piece, but that did not work.

This waste of time and searching for a forced line leaded to tiredness and also leaded to search for a forced line that wasn't there, but I assumed it had to be there, so I took a risky, wrong piece sacrifice, in a position where you'll win with normal moves.
Just find the next move, not the whole way to mate.

The next diagram was a shocking momemt from an opening of a team mate where maybe something went wrong for black after 1. c4 Nf6 2. Nc3 e6 3. e4 d5 4. e5 Ne4 5. Nxe4 dxe4 6. Qg4 Qd4 7. Nf3


Basical, you have 2 candidate moves: Qd8 with a clear pawn down or Qb6 with an unclear position/counter play. Now, my team mate invested >1 hour, to calculate what happens after Qb6. That is an extreme example of time wastage. Check for blunders and whether it might be worse than Qd8. If that's not likely, move it and find the following moves when it's your turn to act, but not 5 moves before.

O.K., this does depend a bit on playing strength, if you are a master, maybe it's different, but on level ~2000 like me, it's waste of time+energy to find long forced lines when it's not necessary. Find the next logical move, blunder check it, move it.

Good point, I'd like to phrase it in a simplified form:

If your next move is forced and the lines fork after your opponent's reply, just play the move and think of the options when the decision point comes. This may sound obvious but it's violated so often (yours truly included).

I think, that simplified version is more like Nr. 2.
Tbh, I don't know how to put in simple words, so I will just give another example.

Let's say we have opposite castled to queenside and we decide to make the natural kingside pawn storm vs villain. So the basic plan will be to play h4-h5,g4-g5,get rooks behind, get bishops+queens to look at h7-f7, get a knight maybe to f4/f5. So our job now is to find the right sequenze of the moves and also to look what villain does and to react accordingly and always to blunder-check. Our job is not the calculation of how the pawn storm will succeed (will we play h6,g6,both or a piece sacrifice?). We start doing that if all our troups are ready, not before.

This thinking is even more important when playing <2000. Often if you ask players why they didn't continue their attack as aggressive as possible, they will respond: 'Well, I didn't see how it will succeed, how I will break through his wall.'

So, maybe the simplified form is: Don't overthink.

I once read that if you think about a move for more than 20 minutes, the move played will often be a mistake, and in my experience, this unfortunately is true...

You can only think so much about a position and at some point a decision has to be made because the marginal value of another minute spent thinking is less than that of having the minute on the clock.

Maybe this is just the same as #4 above but imho "Don't think about a move for more than 20 minutes" is a useful guideline with standard time controls.

But you should still have some idea of what openings you will play. And you should already know how you deal with mainlines of major openings. In the example given in the OP, there was no reason for the opening debate unless he knew of prior games of his opponent in these lines.

The only thing I would caution here is to not assume your 'forced' move is forced. Sure, it often is forced, but don't let this make you miss a zwischenzug! I think it's very common at my level to not even consider zwischenzugs because the alternative move seems forced.

in my last OTB quad (30 min with 5/sec increment) - we stop writing our moves at 5 minutes - in two of my three games, I had a near even position (or endgame position) when I stopped writing my moves - meaning my blunders occured under time pressure - in the 3rd game, I had more time than my opponent and HE blundered under time pressure -

time pressure - tis a bugger

RB

What really comes through in this thread is the importance in Chess of the decision making process.

It's a question that is not dealt with much in Chess literature, but in my view it is the main determiner of Chess success. At what point do you break off your calculations? How many candidate moves do you consider? In which positions should you trust your intuition and in which positions do you need to really study the position? In which positions does your intuition suggest good moves, and in which positions is your intuition often wrong?

These are the key questions to consider for anyone who wants to improve in Chess. Time management is only one part of the equation in the greater question of how a player approaches a chess position to decide on a move.

That's right, but my point have been, that it might be worth to invest 3-5 mins to look out for a zwischenzug or so, but not 25 mins.
Indeed, I encourage after finding the 'next logical' move to check for all moves of trouble, especially every possible trade and every possible check and in addition every possible zwischenzug.

Uhhhhh first position 1. f6 Qg4 2. Ne7+

holla

And then?

No and then.

Write down clock times of both yourself and your oppt. at every move, some pattern will emerge that you can use for improvement. Nunn advises to virtually never spend more than 20 minutes on any move. If you need more time than that, the variations are probably too complicated to analyze properly OTB.

This.

That reminds me one of my games when I was 14, playing against a 2550 GM. He misplayed the opening like an amateur (despite thinking for a long time on almost every move) and after 20 moves I had a winning position - almost all my pieces attacking his castle, defended only by his knight. Also, my opponent had like 2 minutes for making 20 moves in a hopeless position. I had about 40 minutes and (because I was 14 and stupid) instead of spending 10 minutes on finding the simplest way to win (I got him totally crushed so there were multiple ways to finish him off) I started blitzing and obviously I started making blunders and eventually lost the game.

I've seen a GM tank over a forced recapture for 10 min +, but i assume that was because the next sequence was also forced and he wanted to play the move after that sequence instantly to put more pressure on his slightly time-troubled opponent. I wouldn't try stuff like that myself though.

Most often time trouble is not associated to trying to calculate long forced lines but to investing too much times over marginal decisions like "which rook" or general indecisiveness. Some players also are more likely to fall into time trouble playing stronger opponents because they fear monsters under their beds or don't want to embarrass themselves by blundering or choosing the wrong plans. This goes hand in hand with playing over-cautiously.

My advice would be to play those games aggressively, choosing positive plans and not worry too much about the risks involved. You will be surprised by what you can actually get away with against sub-IM competition. One thing you usually don't get away with is playing passively, drifting on the clock and on the board and then defending an inferior position while behind on the clock.

It's not checkmate, so why can't you finish the line for me?

You might want to read Attack and Defence by Dvoretsky & Yusupov. The above questions are answered in the first chapter.

Nice thread only just got to reading it. I run into time trouble quite often so meh.