Road to the Grandmaster title - Time management - Life Management

On last Sunday I played in the Hungarian first league. My team is the Kobanya Chess Club which is in the middle of the field and our opponent was around the same strong.

My opponent was Vilmos Balint a young and strong Hungarian player rated 2311 FIDE. 

When I prepared I realized, he likes to play tactical chess, so I decided to play the Slav defense to get a solid position out of the opening.

He played the Reti opening and an early c4 move which I rarely played in a tournament game, so made me think. 

Actually it made me think to much and too long. After around 10 moves I was already behind in time a lot. 

The position was fine and even I won a pawn. I did not play the best way, so he got some compensation for the pawn. The pair of bishops in a in a blocked position and my knight was pinned. Everything was defended and I hoped to be able slowly go out of the pin and use my extra pawn.

After the analysis I realized I was not right, the position was equal, because I can not go out of the pin, need to accept the draw by repetition.

Instead of that I just made a losing move, blocked my own rook with my queen. I thought c7 would be the best for the queen to protect the center and support the a6-a5 advance, but I did not make theh blunder-check, because of my low time.

After this game I realized and decided to change my time and life management. 

Time is a big issue in my life. How to make and keep the priorities. 

Example before the game I stayed up over midnight and needed to get up at 7:15 am.

Really bad move. I need at least 8 hours of sleep before a tourney game.

Other important issue is to make decisions and stop procrastination.

When I have 2 or more moves which looks the same good, I need to make a random decision instead of going over the same ideas many times.

I decided to go to sleep 11:00 pm as the latest and stop teaching or other thing at 10:30 pm to have time to prepare to go to bed.

Other issue is how to divide time between work and family. How much time to use for teaching and for preparing for tournaments and write blog posts. Yesterday I realized I use at least 30 minutes each day to write his blog.

Also I think I need to start to play blitz games to play against strong players and practice what I learn before the tournament games.

I am thinking about playing 1 hour daily 3 minutes games on chess.com to play against masters and grandmasters. Probably I would need at least 30 minutes or maybe 60 minutes to very briefly analyse the blitz games. That is already at least 4-4,5 hours work on my chess preparation and blogging.

2 hours of tactical training

1 hour 3-minutes games

1 hour analyzing the games

30 minutes blogging.

I stream all of this activity to share it with others.

Let me show the game:

Today I studied tactics for 1 hour and 20 minutes, plus I will study it on Chess TV and on my stream in 3 hours from now.

Let me share a few puzzles I solved today from

                        Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player

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The puzzles are all about how to save a lost game: