Clock Control, Time Discipline

Dan O'Dowd · Post by **Dan O'Dowd** » Fri May 17, 2013 7:30 pm

While mods out there may feel this is better suited to 'Chess Questions' I would appreciate it being kept in General since it may reach more readers.

To all those reading, many of the threads I start either need, or get, little reply. If you have anything constructive to share with me in this one, please do. This one is really, really important. Sorry in advance for rambling my little chess heart out

Forgive me forum, for I have sinned. And not just a normal sin. I've been sinning my whole life. (Don't worry, there's not going to be a rosary

)

I could reasonably wager that my clock control is the worst of any of you on the forum by a long way.

For many years while realising this, I have perhaps, done a lot of attempted rationalisation on such a subject. "I've been taking a long time to ensure I didn't make a tactical blunder/fully understand the position I'm in etc". You can delete as appropriate but they're all on roughly the same level of rubbish.

To give you just ONE example, from many hundreds, let's look at a game I played last month against a 147 (which I'm annotating without an engine, and which was anyways very sloppy), with a time control of two hours.

Out of 120 minutes, I spent the following amounts on the following moves as Black.

move 8, 13 minutes

move 9, 3 minutes

move 10, 9 minutes

move 11, 3 minutes

move 13, 2 minutes

move 14, 12 minutes

move 16, 7 minutes

move 17, 3 minutes

move 18, 8 minutes

move 19, 6 minutes

move 20, 6 minutes

move 21, 35 minutes

And I fell below 5 minutes by move 33.
................................................

I often seem to get into positions where I have enough ability to do some research if I were at home, but often the fact that I'm at the board, and strongly able to calculate relatively deeply means I end up indulging this, be it justified as seeing all that needs to be seen, or sometimes because it's enjoyable. Sometimes for unrelated unknown reasons, I find it much harder to concentrate like this at home.

I think we can reasonably say that part of this clock use is down to my never having formally studied at home properly. I come to the board and every single game brings something new, almost, where I have to sit and begin pondering when I should already have the road map and the dead ends signalled in my head subconsciously. This is a fundamental lack of understanding.

But a lot of it is psychology. Whether correlative or not, a lot of the times in the past that I have tried to move more quickly on a whim have resulted in horrible moves. This of course is because I wasn't using a valid thought process, but oftentimes has severely put me off making a proper change because of a crippling fear of making self-perceptible errors. I hate it! I think many of you may identify with me on this one. It's the most annoying thing in the world to play move x and then moments later, see and understand refutation -x, because it leaves us with a sense of incompletion, of failure to give our all. Such cracks in our mental cement can render us brokenminded as players.

So I've resolved to kill the root, to kill the weed (but not to buy Roundup weed killer), by focusing exclusively on my clock control and the chess issues that go hand-in-hand with it, before I attempt any future development of my knowledge. Because what is knowledge if you cannot apply it, because you spent a half hour doing a Ph.D on move 10?

For this I need help from others. Both in looking at the timestamps of some of my higher quality games of the last few years, to:

1. Help me identity when I take too long on a noncritical position, through overcalculation.
2. Help me identify when I don't take long enough on an important position, through hand-waving judgement.
3. By playing games with me online at a realistic time control (G60 perhaps would suffice), so they can prod me when I need to move having thought too long given the criticality of the position.

I don't know if many/any people will be able/willing to help me in this, but if you are interested, please let me know.

Joey Stewart · Post by **Joey Stewart** » Fri May 17, 2013 8:39 pm

I dont think that clock control was a major issue here but more that Nxe5 is a pretty good tactical shot by black and gets him into a much better position which he could have probably won with more accurate endgame technique.

I suppose I could say, with hindsight, that you should have spent more time in the opening checking for his tactic but to be fair I dont know if I would have spotted that every time.

The time you spent working out an appropriate defence for your king was likely what saved your half a point, as the position was very dicey for you and to emerge into a rook endgame with only one pawn down was quite a good achievement.

Dan O'Dowd · Post by **Dan O'Dowd** » Fri May 17, 2013 9:40 pm

Joey Stewart wrote:I dont think that clock control was a major issue here...

With respect you have not listened. The game is irrelevant, it is only an example of my clock control issues. (For the record, Black's subsequent play once Ke2 came was appalling) And I've mentioned explicitly, that across hundreds of my games clock control is an issue - it's the title of the thread!

Joey Stewart · Post by **Joey Stewart** » Fri May 17, 2013 9:44 pm

Show me another game then, this one was very interesting and deserved alot of time spent on the moves. I want to see you getting into time trouble with a more boring drawish position, and then we might be able to get closer to finding out what is going wrong.

Dan O'Dowd · Post by **Dan O'Dowd** » Fri May 17, 2013 9:49 pm

I should also point out that I have timestamped my games going back several years. Over the course of the next few days I will get to putting all this info together.

Black moves time left out of 120 minutes:

After:

move 1, 112 m

move 2, 110m

move 3, 108m

move 4, 85m

move 5, 84

move 7, 71

move 10, 53

move 11, 51

move 13, 44

move 15, 28

move 16, 26

move 18, 23

stopped recording after every move

after move 24, 13.46

Joey Stewart · Post by **Joey Stewart** » Fri May 17, 2013 11:21 pm

One thing that really sprang out at me there was around move 15 you wasted alot of time over an obvious recapture. Never spend that long thinking about taking a piece back, unless you are maybe in some freak tactical position where there might be a better option. Even if there is some sort of killer trick up your opponents sleeve, you might as well get your piece back and face it with time on your clock, and if you are having to do anything other then taking the piece then you are likely lost in the long run so either way its best to just get it done with and carry forward - never debate over a capture your opponent makes in a closed position!

Dan O'Dowd · Post by **Dan O'Dowd** » Fri May 17, 2013 11:25 pm

I think you've misread the description in this case: my recaptures (Nxc6, Qxc7, cxb3) were all almost instantaneous. The move I spent time on was 15...c4, in that case it was one of those 'position has settled so let's think about plans while confirming I'm level not ahead (aka suspend your emotional biscuits time)' moves. I think unfortunately that any one game diffracts the nature of my general problems too sparsely to do any indepth analysis online. I do know however that a lot of the time, my relatively strong ability (to those around me) to analyse deep into the Void and go mad, like The Master, leaves me doing far more calc than others for whatever reasons. I'll carry on playing these 'move because I think I need to' games online in the meantime, and once I have an appropriate batch of games from my last few years with time info, I'll annotate the probable reasons for such deviations and try to generalise herein.

Joey Stewart · Post by **Joey Stewart** » Fri May 17, 2013 11:46 pm

Yeah, I am not really seeing anything terrible by you yet - the time is being spent fruitfully in these games and you are making the best of the positions your opponent sets you.
Perhaps you need to just lower your threshold as to when you consider yourself to be in time trouble and stop making the very best moves right up to the bitter end. For myself, I like to budget two minutes for each move and if I ever get less then 20 minutes on my clock I consider the heat to be on and I need to really speed up, not continue to vainly analyse in the hope that a win presents itself before the flag falls.

James Coleman · Post by **James Coleman** » Fri May 17, 2013 11:49 pm

Perhaps I'm reading the figures wrongly : Were you late for the second game? 8 minutes is an inordinate amount of time to think over the first move, and 23 minutes on move 4 is hard to comprehend...I'd get bored

Joey Stewart · Post by **Joey Stewart** » Sat May 18, 2013 12:00 am

Ive done it in 4ncl before, if my opponent is firing off moves in the opening very quickly I tend to suspect preperation so I like to see how good their memory is when I have made them wait 20 minutes to see what line I am really going to play.

James Coleman · Post by **James Coleman** » Sat May 18, 2013 12:07 am

Sure, that makes some sort of sense in a 4NCL game but much less so in a league game against a random opponent unless there is some previous history between the two. And of course you have substantially more time at your disposal in the 4NCL than in a typical evening league game.

Roger de Coverly · Post by **Roger de Coverly** » Sat May 18, 2013 12:27 am

In the Birds Opening game, it seems as if you took at least an hour to reach move 10. Whilst the position might be unique, it looks quite normal for a position that might arise from a Birds or with colours reversed a Dutch. Pragmatically, if you review games with a database or chess engine, you find that move choices don't make a lot of difference to the evaluation. So you just develop quickly, in both the chess and time management sense, confident that there aren't any game changing super moves.

Dan O'Dowd · Post by **Dan O'Dowd** » Sat May 18, 2013 1:02 am

James Coleman wrote:Perhaps I'm reading the figures wrongly : Were you late for the second game? 8 minutes is an inordinate amount of time to think over the first move, and 23 minutes on move 4 is hard to comprehend...I'd get bored

Oh no, the second game I was there at the start

I was considering whether to allow a Sicilian (with 2. e4) because it struck me that if I then played 2. e4 d5, I'm more in a Scandinavian on the other side of a position I've actually had before, if White plays 3. e5. If he deviated I felt confident I'd be able to outplay my opponent in the resultant open position. The consideration came that 3. exd5 Qxd5 is fine for Black, since ...c5 helps him more than f4 has helped White.

I also considered though more briefly, whether to play 1...e5, From's Gambit. I decided against this on the basis that while it generates obtuse positions (which suit my stronger judgement with messy positional factors), I could easily go wrong and wind up in some deep sheep.

In my last game with 1. f4, all the way back in 2005, on 2nd board of the County Major (when coincidentally, the top board also featured f4...), I responded with a d5/c5 setup not dissimilar to this one, but it seemed worth it to let White have a chance at e4. At the time of that first game, I used to end up playing the same sort of setup against a variety of White openings, so perhaps there was negapsychology in my choice.

I was also considering playing 1...g6 on the basis that I'd heard you are meant to play g3 against the Dutch, and also because I had an intuition that he would be gunning for b3. After 2. e4 however, I figured I couldn't properly navigate my way.

23 minutes on move 4 was borne from a logical paradox of what to play! I reasoned that without any other information, 4...Bd7 would be a lemon of passivity. I therefore immediately looked at 4...Bg4 5. h3 Bxf3 6. Qxf3 but that would force me into 6...Nf6. I understood and agreed with White's nominal plan of doubling my c-pawns and blocking/attacking c5, but I couldn't possibly bring myself to play such a passive move! While this in itself is no problem, for some reason during the game I had a bad feeling about that whole setup, possibly because it totally counterindicates the original idea behind e6/Nge7, of gaining an extra piece exchange from the doubling of my pawns, while also keeping my Bishop free to trot to a6. Of course as White in a Nimzo, you never play Bd2, but the ironic thing is that when I looked in my database afterwards, that was the only move I could find!

To clarify, this was an afternoon game and this was our first encounter (Taylor-O'Dowd that is). Funnily enough, the Shaw game above is connected with my two birds with the tournament anecdote above for it happened in the first round of the same event in 2005, and was a far quicker draw than the one you see there. I was quite astonished that my opponent was unable to make proper progress in that game, but then I do have a ridiculous history of saving about 8 Rook endgames a year from 1 or 2 pawns down to dead draws.

Joey, I'm interested in your declaration that the time I've spent on my moves is fruitful - perhaps I can classify some of my games as befitting this description (I'll post one below to see if I'm on your wavelength), though certainly a game on Thursday I played against someone graded 108 (but at this time of year who always seems to be playing at the peak of his powers) ended up with me in 'research mode' likely borne out of fear of missing some key thing in the tactics or positional machinations of what lay before me, which is what always seems to happen when I tread lightly in the snowfalls of a new opening position.

At the time I was far more a pure calculator in that I had less positional knowledge for statics, but my general fluency in dynammic positions, if I had time to use it, was a bit stronger. This game was also the first where I tried this system; of course, subsequent games result in an increased opening knowledge so a few moves tend to be saved, or if I'm in my absolute home positions from a certain opening, I can sometimes bash out 15 moves without so much as an eyelid batted. And at least in this game I induced my beast of an opponent (who has been known to dismantle 175 players on his strong days) into using one third of his time on six moves.

Move times from 90 minutes to start:

Move 2, 88.
Move 4, 83.
Move 5, 71.
Move 6, 61 (Black 76)
Move 7, 60/74
Move 8, 55/66
Move 9, 47/65
Move 10, 44/50
Move 13, 33/46
Move 16, 29/41
Move 19, 23/34
Move 20, 20/32
Move 22, 11.20
Move 23, 10.48/27 (Black's restraint is beginning to tell)
Move 24, 8.04/23
Move 25, 2.56/17.58
Move 26 (the losing move really) 2.53

Of course this was a ridiculously tense and well played game in terms of the judgements (excluding the slips) for two players of these grades. I wonder whether there is a traceable element of planning unfluency by comparison to those games I've played where I'm all guns blazing. Certainly some time-indulgence could almost definitely be found across all games.

Roger de Coverly · Post by **Roger de Coverly** » Sat May 18, 2013 10:35 am

Dan O'Dowd wrote: The consideration came that 3. exd5 Qxd5 is fine for Black, since ...c5 helps him more than f4 has helped White.

That transposes into a Grand Prix Sicilian ( 1. e4 c5 2. f4 d5) with a move order popular in the 1970s
but little seen nowadays. The reason isn't exclusively 3. exd5 Qxd5 . A number of players including Tony Miles had been able to demonstrate that Black can be made to suffer in the endings after White gets d4 in and trades the queens. The real reason for its disappearance is the line 3. exd5 Nf6 4. c4 e6 with a very strong countergambit in the style of the Icelandic.

There's a new book by Svetznikov which gives coverage to the 2. f4 move order and demonstrates some ideas by White to attempt to take the pawn, consolidate and win. Don't expect sparkling attacking chess though.

Roger de Coverly · Post by **Roger de Coverly** » Sat May 18, 2013 10:48 am

Dan O'Dowd wrote: Move 10, 44/50
Move 13, 33/46
Move 16, 29/41

Regarding the Scandinavian game, move 14 is where a lot of time could be invested. Essentially you have the choice between developing normally with Nf3, 0-0, rooks to the centre etc., or entering a madhouse with 14 g4. There's a trade off against time, because if you are going to grab a pawn in exchange for suffering , you need a bit of time for blunder checking which is what determined the game.

It helps if you know something of your opponent's style as to whether to enter such positions. I've observed of lower graded players that some can be very competent at playing solidly but will collapse as soon as there are some tricky tactics to work through. Others are fine tactically or play with aggression, but will play over ambitious rubbish if there's nothing to do other than be solid.

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