A Change of Pace: How Slowing Time Controls Speeds Up Learning
In this post I want to share a bit about how as an adult, I rediscovered my passion for chess a few months back and won the first round of my group in the 2021 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship. I’ll also outline how focusing on daily games instead of short-time controls games such as Blitz and Rapid (3- to 10-min per move) has helped me not only to improve my game, but also to have more fun.
You are probably tired of hearing about the Queen’s Gambit effect, but it got me too! I’m a 34-year-old dad who came back to chess after watching the Queen’s Gambit back in October 2020. Watching little Beth Harmon learning chess and then defeating Mr. Shaibel brought back good memories from childhood of beating my grandpa at chess (a super big deal for me after many years of trying unsuccessfully – he was my ultimate challenge). This sense of nostalgia combined with my love for the game and the need to find a healthy quarantine- friendly hobby brought me to back to chess, and specifically chess.com.
Chess.com is not new to me; I created an account back in 2013, played about 10 games, disappeared for years, and then have been playing Blitz games casually since 2017. As I’m writing this, I look back and ask myself, why was I playing 3- and 5-minute games? I can’t really play that fast! My Blitz chess.com rating is about 1100... I guess I just wanted to have some quick fun and I was not really looking to improve my game. I did zero analysis after any game.
In November 2020, I started playing chess again with the goal of getting better at it. My first few games were Blitz, but I quickly realized I did not know what I was doing, so I switched to Rapid games (10 min), which gave me a little bit more time to think, plus it appeared to be the most popular time control on chess.com. After a couple of months, some basic study and 400 games later, my rating got stuck at around 1300.
I’m aware at this point that I need to play longer games and analyze them to get better. In my case, I felt I needed at least 1 hour of time control. Yet, it is really hard for me to find time at home to sit for one or two hours straight to play chess without being pulled away by life’s responsibilities (family, work, etc.). Late at night is not really an option for me either because I’m tired and I’m afraid I might fall asleep during a game. Thus, I was getting a bit discouraged when I suddenly discovered daily chess!
Playing Daily Chess in a Global Online Tournament
In December 2020, I learned about the 2021 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship, and since I’ve never played daily chess before, I was very curious about having 24 hours to play each move. Although I did not know what to expect, it seemed like more than enough time to put real thinking into my games and get better, so I registered.
One day per move is a lot of time, but this tournament format requires you to play 22 simultaneous games at a time (11 with White and 11 with Black). Plus, I needed to consider that I was not dropping everything to focus on chess 24/7. So, some time management skills were required. My plan was to use any spare time I had during the day and try to play a bit at night before I got too tired. Also, I decided to finish faster the games against opponents with the lowest chess.com ratings, so that I could have more time per move for the games against opponents with the highest ratings, assuming here that these would be the toughest ones and I would have more time to focus on them. That being said, for all games I put great effort into proper thinking and analysis. My current goal is to learn as much as I can from this experience. Winning my round was just a dream not yet really in my head when I started the tournament.
Things I Discovered from Playing Daily Chess That Can Benefit You As Well
1. There is plenty of time to think, analyze, calculate, exercise your brain! Think about your opening, middlegame, endgame, think about your strategy, think about your opponent’s plan, etc.
2. You can try new things and solidify learnings. For example, if I watch a video or read about how to play an opening, I will not truly learn it until I play it in a real game. The daily chess tournament was a good way to practice new openings and explore what is possible on my own.
3. Flexibility! The fact that you can come back to the same position several times within a 24-hour period was amazing because not all the best moves come to mind right away (but hopefully one day they will 😊). Thus, I would review a game multiple times a day, and only play my next move when I felt comfortable with my decision, which normally involved analyzing a couple of variations. Most of the time, that next move was one of the first ones that came to mind, and other times a better move would come up after the 2nd or 3rd time analyzing the position.
4. Time to pause and recalibrate. In daily games, you have many more opportunities to step back and look at the big picture. Sometimes, we need to pause to remember the obvious, that the end-goal is to checkmate our opponent, not win material or something else.
2021 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship – My Round 1 Results
The tournament has gathered 16.5K players globally. Round 1 is finally over for me and I scored 21.5 out of 22 points, which put me in 1st place (out of 12 people in Group #54). There are 2 more rounds left, but I wanted to celebrate this unexpected accomplishment. When I learned that only the group winner(s) advance to the next round, I did not think my chances were high because there were folks with a significantly higher rating than mine (comparing our Blitz and Rapid ratings - I did not have a Daily rating). I think my plan of starting off finishing the less tough games first worked, because it helped me to build confidence. Each win, no matter what rating my opponent had was a great boost of confidence, which made me put even more effort into the other games.
To end this post, I just wanted to share two games I played that I’ve had the time to comment and analyze. Since I’m still learning, don’t expect deep analysis. Rather, my goal is for you learn what I was thinking as I was playing each move. I hope you enjoy!
Here is a picture of the standings of my group at 91% completion:
