Which Time Control Is Best For Improvement?

You often hear that playing slow games is good for chess and blitz is bad. There’s a compelling argument to be made for slower time controls: If you’re forced to play quickly you’ll revert to what you already know and rehash the same steps. Only given more time can you question your assumptions, think deeply, and push the limits of your abilities.

But then I started thinking about Daily Chess. If you’re unfamiliar, Daily Chess is basically the internet version of correspondence chess. Typically you have between a day and a week to play your move. If chess improvement is all about slowing it down, you’d think Daily Chess would be amazing. And it could be if you really put all your effort into analyzing each position! But most people find that very challenging. Without meaningful time pressure or stakes what usually ends up happening is you dash off a random move in-between replying to tweets.

By Michael Hofmann, Kitzingen. - fotografiert am 30. Oktober 2004, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24301525

Of course, there are a lot of other factors that make Daily Chess different from OTB chess, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like it’s these other factors – not the time control – that makes OTB chess special. Benji Portheault recently wrote a great post about the importance of your environment for performance. The environment of an OTB tournament has a lot of unique factors going for it:

• Everyone is quiet and focused, making it easier for you to focus.

• The stakes are high, whether in terms of actual prize money, or the potential embarrassment of losing face-to-face.

• There’s a community of other people who are serious about getting better at chess.

There’s a lot of evidence in fields outside of chess that these three factors – environment, stakes, and community – are key to learning. In contrast, I can’t think of another field where doing it really slowly is considered the key to improvement. Clearly you have to put in a lot of total time to get good at anything, but you don’t have to do any single iteration incredibly slowly.

There’s also a very simple and compelling argument for faster time controls: You can play more games in the same amount of time! Given that a big part of chess is pattern recognition and there are a ton of different patterns, this is a big deal. When I was putting together my top juniors rating progress dashboard, one thing that struck me was just how many games some of these guys play, in some cases upwards of 200 in a single year. Of course, these are rated OTB games, so you could take that as more evidence for the value of slow chess. But the larger point is getting better at chess requires playing a hell of a lot of chess, and if you’re an adult with a job, getting all of that practice in the form of classical OTB games isn’t realistically going to happen.

I’d suggest the following equation holds pretty well:

Improvement = Focus * Time

The more focused time you can invest, the better you’ll get, but it doesn’t matter that much whether the time is a few slow games, or relatively more, faster games. What matters is the total time and focus.

A corollary of this is that zero times anything is zero. Clearly, if you don’t spend any time on chess you won’t improve. Likewise, if you have zero focus you won’t improve no matter how much time you spend. This is the real problem with blitz: it’s all too easy to zone out and just go through the motions. At this point you become a blitz zombie, playing for hours and hours and not learning anything. But it’s also possible to apply focus to blitz and if you do it can be a great learning tool. If you want to learn more about how to use blitz to improve, I wrote a post about that.

Personally I love using rapid training games for improvement. They’re slow enough to be a “real game” where I get a chance to practice calculation and in-depth decision-making, yet fast enough that I can realistically play a game in a typical day, maybe even multiple games. Grandmasters seem to agree: When Anish Giri created the series Giri’s Secret Training Matches the time control was 15+10 rapid (okay, I know the “secret” in the title is a bit of a joke, but I know other GMs who play rapid training matches without posting the video online!).

Unfortunately, rapid time controls are criminally underrated, which can sometimes make it hard to find a game. When it comes to blitz you can generally find a game 24-7 within seconds no matter what level you’re at (as long as you’re happy with 3+0). For classical there are options like the fantastic Lichess LoneWolf league. But rapid games are harder to find. For that reason I’m working with my friend Martin Justesen, who recently started the Chess Training Accountability Group, on setting up an online rapid league, so stay tuned for that!

Ultimately I suspect the best strategy is a mix of different time controls. In fact, different time controls emphasize different skills, so the best way go develop a well-rounded skill set is to practice in a variety of settings.