Time Management

The hidden factor in tournament success

Which area of chess improvement has the biggest bang for your buck in terms of rating improvement? Tactics? Openings? Endgames? You could make a case for any of these, but for many players it’s something that you won’t find in many chess books: time management.

Many players wouldn’t even consider time management to be part of chess improvement, which might explain why most people are so bad at it. Think about it: do you use your time in a way that maximizes your chances of winning the game? You can always improve your chess understanding, but if you don’t use your time effectively it will torpedo your performance. The biggest upgrade in time management is to go from seeing it as something that happens to you, by accident, to something you actively and strategically manage.

Photo by Artyom Kabajev on Unsplash

Common Mistakes

There are two big common mistakes I see.

The first is playing too slowly early in the game. Of course, it’s equally possible to play too fast, but playing too slow seems far more common, especially among adults, and especially especially among adults who read this newsletter. For this post I’ll focus on the time trouble addicts, the players who play too slow. (Maybe we’ll have to do a part two on those who have the opposite problem, playing too fast.)

What seems to happen is players want to feel a certain level of comfort before making a move. In positions where they can’t reach that level of comfort, they marinate until it becomes obvious that they’ve already spent far too long on the move, then play something in desperation. We’ll talk more about specific strategies for playing faster later, but in brief, you need to use your time strategically, even if it means moving before you’re comfortable.

The second mistake is spending too much time in non-critical positions. A critical position is one that is likely to determine the outcome of the game; this includes positions where many captures, threats, and other forcing sequences are possible; and also irreversible positional decisions like trades and pawn breaks. These are the situations that warrant investing a lot of time.

Not everyone will agree with this, but I feel the main use of time in a chess game is calculating. It’s not that positional judgment is unimportant, but right or wrong, it’s relatively quick, and more time probably won’t help much. The thing that really takes time is crunching through moves. So use your time in situations where you need to calculate and the price of a mistake is high.

Non-critical positions are all the other ones, where you mostly make quiet developing or improving moves. If you’re the kind of player who wants to be certain of making the best move before you act, these positions can be a huge time trap, because there are often many moves of comparable value. Whereas in a critical position you might have one move that wins and one move that loses, in a non-critical move you often have many decent alternatives that are hard to distinguish between. In practice it’s better to choose one of these moves quickly by any means, even randomly, than to spend too much time vacillating between alternatives. As long as you play moves that are safe and sensible, these decisions are unlikely to decide the game.

Time Management Techniques

Write down your time after each move

There’s a saying in business that “what gets measured gets managed.” It’s tough to review and improve your time management if you don’t have any record of how you spent your time (and it’s hard to remember after the fact). The solution to this is writing down your remaining time after each move on your scoresheet (and yes, this is legal according to the rules). Then after the game review your time usage and think about whether it gave you the best possible chance to win the game. The moves where you spent the most time tend to be positions you struggled to understand, so having that information is also helpful for directing your conventional chess studying.

You could also write down your opponent’s remaining time, but personally I don’t. If it’s true that most people manage their time poorly, it would be crazy to base your own time usage on what your opponent is doing. I prefer to focus on using my own time to make the best decisions I can and let my opponent (mis)manage their time however they see fit. This is the whole point of a two-side chess clock, after all: you have your own time and there’s nothing your opponent can do about it.

Set checkpoints

To stay “on schedule” it helps to set checkpoints at certain moves. For example, say you’re playing in a tournament where the time control is game in 90 minutes with an additional 30 minutes at move 40. As they say, “There are no heroes in time pressure.” If you get down to seconds on the clock, regardless of how good your position is or how much stronger than your opponent you are, there’s a decent chance you’ll blunder and lose the game, so it makes sense to build in a buffer. So let’s say you want to have at least 10 minutes left over at move 40. Then a schedule could look something like this:

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. You can adjust the exact schedule based on your time control and preferences. For example, if you have a solid opening repertoire, you should really aim to spend less time on moves 0-10, because those should be mostly preparation. In any case, the important thing is to have a plan for how you’re going to use your time effectively, and a sense of whether you’re on schedule.

Decide in advance how much time to take on a move

Most people dive right into moves and variations, but before you get into the weeds, try thinking about how much time it makes sense to spend based on the big picture considerations: the nature of the position, move number, and how much time is left. For example, say you’re playing in a tournament with a time control of one hour for the whole game, it’s early in the game, you have 55 minutes left, and you’re deciding between several developing moves in a non-critical position. Without getting into the details of the moves, you already know you probably shouldn’t spend more than a minute on this move.

Of course, in some cases you may find that the position is more critical than you thought and you can decide to invest more time, but be honest with yourself: Is it really a critical position, or are you just dithering? It’s tough to remember to do this every move, but even doing it a few times a game can help to build the habit of thinking about time management strategically.

Conclusion

For a lot of players, playing a chess game is like taking a test. They think there’s a right move and if they don’t find it they’ll be corrected or even humiliated. But when it comes to tournament chess, I find it more helpful to think of it as a sport. If you’re playing soccer, there’s not really a perfect way to attack the goal; there are too many variables. There are only better or worse ways, based on their chances of success. A chess board is much more circumscribed than a soccer field, but it’s still way too complex to solve all the possibilities, certainly within the time limits of a tournament game. All you can do is try something and see if it works.