Developing with Daily Part 2
Introduction
It has been almost two years since I wrote my first article called Developing with Daily. At that time I had only been playing daily games for two months so the focus was some early findings and my goals of playing daily.
In these two years I have played several hundred more daily games, along the way having some positive, even great, experiences as well as some frustrating and disappointing once. It was a useful learning undertaking that is approaching the end of it's journey.
In this article I'm sharing my insights and lessons I learned.
Index
Characteristics of Daily games part 1 Time Structure
Characteristics of Daily games part 2 Outside Assistance
In daily games players usually have 1 day (24h) or 3 days (72h) for each move. The obvious advantage of this format is that players get to spend all the time they need to find the best move to play. As you’d expect, players spending more time on each move will have an impact on the game and their more time will have an impact on your chess game and how they unfold.
Other than the effects of the time per more, there are two more factors to consider, the effect of more time spent away from the board between each move as well as the effect of spreading out the game over longer stretches of time.
Infinite Time
Having one full day or three full days to play your next move allows you thinking time that’s practically infinite. While it’s not practical in practice. As a comparison, the longest game played in a world championship (the 6th game of the 2021 World Chess Championship) lasted for a little over 8 hours. You can spend more than twice as much time on each move as both players combined spent on their entire game.
Other than the effect on your personal life (and your sanity), there is no downside to spending as much time as you want on your next move. Time in daily games isn’t an expendable resource, like it is in rapid or blitz games. At worst it’s time wasted.
Conditions are equal for both players, but not everyone can or want to put in the same effort and time. It’s less of a level playing field. Instead working harder will boost your winning chances, which in a way levels the playing field.
There are certain benefits to having as much time as you need to think about your moves before playing them: You can play your best chess. You will also get a better learning opportunity. Analyzing games where you played your best chess will give more important feedback, because it exposes more fundamental problems.
Higher Quality Games
The most predictable effect of players spending more time on each move is that they will play higher quality moves. It’s not even necessary to invest much of the abundance of time that’s available. Even when players use just a fraction if their time makes a difference.
To put it in a bit of perspective, let’s compare this format to a 10-minute rapid game without increment, which allows a player 10-15 seconds thinking time for each move. If players in daily games spend only 1 minute on each move, that’s still 4 to 6 times as much as they would in a rapid game. This difference alone prevents a lot of blunders.
On top of that, having the option to take more time when you need it most is just as much a game changer. Because players can spend 5 or 10 minutes in a very complex or critical position they will find better moves when it’s most relevant to the outcomes of the game. Even when all other moves are played at their usual rapid pace.
Less blunders, more accurate moves on average and stronger moves in critical positions will all lead to higher quality chess games.
Practice Positional Play
More time for calculation and more time to look at all possible moves means that players are less likely to miss tactics, or to fall for traps. This changes the dynamic of the game. Tactics are less effective, cheesy tricks and traps are nowhere nearly as successful as they are in live games. Aggressively pressuring your opponent to force them into blundering also doesn’t work like in live games.
This format is better suited if you want to Practice your Petrosian or to Cultivate your Capablanca. With tactics’ diminished importance, daily games are often more positional games. It depends on your and your opponent’s playing style, there’s still plenty of room for tactics, but other games can be very slow strategic maneuvering games where just a few inaccuracies can decide the outcome of the game.
For me that was what attracted me to play Daily games in the first place. I was doing well tactically, but I was clueless in positions that didn’t have a clear solution.
Inconsistency
While the game format allows players to spend practically limitless time to think about each of their moves, IRL circumstances often do put a limit on players and how much time they can invest in analyzing each position before making their moves. Primarily because you can’t predict when it’s your turn again.
Rapid and Blitz games limit how much time they can spend on their moves, but they offer one advantage that daily games don’t. You can play the entire game when you are fit and focused, when the conditions are perfect, in a location of your choice, exactly as you please. In daily games, on the other hand, you can’t always play under perfect circumstances.
Games that have been top quality all the way through, can end abruptly three weeks later due to a sudden lack of focus causing an unnecessary blunder. This is by no means a unique feature of daily games, in fact it's a far more common occurrence in live games. But in contrast with live games where it's unavoidable with seconds to play each move on average, it should be preventable in daily. In daily it happens more unexpectedly and it feels completely needless. But it happens more often than you'd think because the flow of the game gets interrupted all the time.
Continuity
As a result of having longer stretches of time between moves, players won’t always remember their train of thought when logging in much later. The typical result is playing a blunder that you had already spotted earlier, but suddenly forgot. I have plenty of examples of positions where I suspect a blunder was caused by these interruptions. But it’s impossible to know for sure.
Example
Here’s an example of a move I missed because too much time had passed since the previous move.
Black is attacking the pawn on b2. How is white to respond? Most popular responses are trying to defend the pawn with Qb3, Qc1 or Qc2 or defending the pawn by moving it to b3. These four moves combined add up to 97% of possible responses.
Stockfish recommends playing Nbd2, which is risky because it only works if you play the correct continuation, or playing h3, presenting a counter threat.
Instead my opponent played O-O, seemingly oblivious to my threat. Now I can play Qxb2 without any risk at all.
But that's not what happened. It was 32 hours later when I contemplated what next to play. What I sawa was my opponent playing O-O, a normal developing move. Without giving too much thought to it I played e6, also just developing.
This has been my biggest frustration and is something to consider before joining daily tournaments, especially the bigger ones with many participants.
In January ‘22 I enrolled in a daily tournament with a 3-day time limit (no vacation), together with 227 other players. After two weeks I had finished half of my games. After another 8 weeks I had finished 19 out of 20 of my games and for the last game I needed 5 more weeks. All in all I was done for the first round on April 30th, three and a half months after the round began.
With a tournament of this size it’s unavoidable that it will take time for the rest of the games to finish. But this was absurd. Finally at long last, in March ‘23, the first round is over, 14 months after we began and more than 10 months after I finished my last game.
The consequence as you might have guessed is a wave of players that lost on time at the beginning of the next round. Many players had not anticipated the second round wouldn’t start until more than a year later.
With significantly fewer players the next round should be happening much quicker than the previous one. A wave of players losing their game in the first few days also helps. This round all games are wrapped up after only 9 months., I had to wait only 4 months after I finished my last game in early July of ‘23.
Round 3 started in Dec ‘23 with only two groups remaining. But in 2024 I was struggling to make myself available to play due to other obligations. I was lacking focus too, so I had to switch to a slower pace as well. Despite losing two games on time I managed to finish first in my group. We proceeded to the final round with 6 players that were left. This was July ‘24, two and a half years after we started the tournament. TWO AND A HALF YEARS!
I'm thrilled to finish in the top 3, but frustrated that I missed out on first place because of my limited availability in the second half of 2024.
In Daily games players are allowed to access certain resources, like books and databases, as long as no engine is used (more details here or here). Chess lessons and videos are allowed as well, as long as no engine or tablebases are used. I don’t really use a wide variety of resources to avoid accidentally running into resources that are prohibited.
There was a time when I didn’t use any of them at all. Not out of principle, but because of my ignorance. Since then I changed my perspective and embraced daily for what it was.
The most important resource players can and often use is the Opening Explorer, which determines to a certain extent what kind of openings are played and which ones aren’t. Because both players have access to the moves that are played by GMs, the opening phase tends to follow the main line more and for longer too.
The second key resource is the analysis tab that allows a player to play lines and compare positions more easily. And they can make notes too.
Main lines
Games will follow opening main lines far longer than in rapid and blitz games. Partly because both players have access to the Masters Database and can play the exact moves that GMs do. at least for the early game positions. In daily games even players without any knowledge of opening theory can play top level opening lines accurately as long as they're still in the Opening Explorer.
This doesn’t mean that all games follow only main lines, but in most cases players will play moves that are played more than once by Grandmaster.
The main advantage of games following the Masters Database is that you gain experience with playing typical positions of top tier openings, rather than the random variety of nonsense opening lines that is commonly seen in blitz games. Depending on your rating of course.
The biggest downside is that games remain in an equal state for much longer than in live games. Sometimes I find it more difficult to create imbalances.
Opening Practice
Opening lines in the Explorer that are trappy, but unsound, are particularly fruitless, because the best refutation is simply available to your opponent.
The feature that makes daily games really shine is the option to play tournaments with a theme, i.e. a specific starting position for all games. When you're interested in practicing a specific opening, it can be unworkable through random chance encounters.
As an example, assume you have been studying the Dutch opening and you’re trying to get some practice playing it. The move 1. …f5 in response to 1. d4 is played in 2% of games. To play it once requires you to play around 100 games on average. Even after 500 games you still can’t be sure you’ll ever see the main line past move 3. In a themed opening you can get a bunch of games at once, playing the opening from both sides in multiple games simultaneously.
The only alternative to practice openings like that is to play games against maia1, maia5 or maia9.
But these daily games can be quite fun, I’ve really enjoyed playing some games with the Jerome Gambit and the Halloween Gambit.
The Analysis Tab is available to play out different variations and see what kind of positions they will. You can also make notes with your ideas on various positions, for me this was part of what helped me make plans.
Writing down your ideas also helps you when you review the game afterwards. It's the only format where you can save your exact thought process for relevant decisions in the game.
Daily games are different from live games, like rapid, blitz and bullet, due to the different time structure and the use of outside assistance.
Having practically unlimited time allows you to spend as much time as you need to play each move, so you can play your absolute best chess. The result is better games, but also more strategic games. You can practice more positional play. Because you can make notes and play out variations you can record your thought process and learn more form each game when you're reviewing them afterwards. With the Opening Explorer available for both players, it's more likely you'll play main lines and also more book moves. It's less ideal for tactical skirmished or trappy opening lines.
The biggest downsides are the longer time periods between each moves, so be careful not to forget what your ideas are in the game, and be aware that you will not be as focused for every move. Finally, for tournament play, keep in mind that it's a very long-term commitment.
That's all. Thanks for reading!
