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Time Pressure: What To Do and How to Avoid It
I made this in 5 minutes, because I didn’t want to get into time pressure…

Time Pressure: What To Do and How to Avoid It

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We’ve all been in this situation: you’re up a pawn or two, but suddenly you notice you only have 10 seconds left on the clock. You start to panic, and you realize that you’ve blundered a whole piece by moving aimlessly. 5 seconds later, the game is over.

This guide will help you avoid situations like those, and what do when you’re in time pressure. Let’s begin!

HOW TO AVOID TIME PRESSURE

1. Have good opening preparation. You don’t want to be down 3 minutes in the clock right in the opening stage. Having good opening prep will help you to blitz out the opening moves and save time for the more critical situations.

2. Manage your time wisely (Use Common Sense). Try to differentiate between critical moves and obvious moves. Only think for the moves that are worthy enough to think about for a long period of time. 

3. Think in your opponent’s time. A good way to avoid time pressure is by thinking in your opponent’s time. This will help you to plan ahead on all the possible moves your opponent plays. If the opponent plays a move that you thought about and you had a follow-up to, you can quickly play the move without spending lots of time.
4. Concentrate. How does concentrating help with time pressure? You may think. Well, when you think about other things besides the game, you have less focus on what to do, therefore spending more time than you would have with focus and concentration. So, don’t think about the result, winning the tournament, gaining/losing rating, stuff like that (I have been in these situations, unfortunately, many, many times.
5. Memorize simple patterns. This will help you to quickly find tactics, checkmating patterns, common positional concepts, etc. Besides time management, however, memorizing simple patterns can also help you find even more complex tactics, like this one:

WHAT TO DO IN SEVERE TIME PRESSURE

1. Don’t Panic. This is very, very, and I mean VERY key when you are facing time trouble. Don’t panic! Just play the moves that look good to you as quick as possible (basically, use your intuition).

2. Play Solid Chess. Basically, don’t try to go into complications where you will have to think for some time. Try to defend everything, make sure you aren’t blundering a piece, and quickly play the move using intuition.

3. Think In Your Opponent’s Time. Same as the last section, this can help you plan ahead in your moves. Also, if you’re playing online chess, try to use pre-moves in cases such as recapturing a piece, or when there’s only 1 obvious move you have to play.

CONCLUSION 

That’s it for this post! Please give me some feedback on what to improve, and comment below on what other tips I should add to my list. Thanks a lot for reading, and hope this helps you in your games! 

- SAS Statements (@SuperAwesomeSarthak)