It's About Time That I Wrote This
Hi!
[T]here is no such thing as a winning position unless it is accompanied by enough time on the clock for you, personally, to win it.
- FM James Schuyler, Your Opponent is Overrated, Chapter 11: "The Clock"
In competitive chess, the goal of the game is plain and simple: to beat and/or not lose to the opponent. The search for the truth in the position is of secondary importance to this objective of winning (or not-losing). You don't have to play the perfect game. You just have to play good enough to outperform your opponent.
There are a lot of different skills that you need to acquire to play your best game and gain a competitive edge. Part of these skills are technical: opening theory, tactical and combinational prowess, positional feel, and endgame technique to name a few. Most chess-content is about these technical aspects of the game. However, many of these essential skills fall outside the realm of technical capability.
Proper time-management is one of these non-technical skills. Its importance can hardly be understated: literally every competitive game of chess is accompanied by an amount of allotted thinking time for both players, and once a player flags (i.e.: runs out of time), that player loses the game (or draws, if no sequence of legal moves exists in which the flagged player gets checkmated). Learning how to manage and distribute your time throughout the game, then, is a vital skill to remain afloat.
It appears to be a very straightforward kind of thing, with some easy fixes and quick and immediately usable tips and tricks to manage your time better. However, the matter is rather more complex than this. There are often underlying psychological causes that contribute to irrational time-use.
In this blog I will explore some of the most common forms of bad time-management. I will explain what I believe to be the main underlying causes that inspire this bad time-management, and I will share my views on ways to deal with these issues and become a mentally stronger player.
Note that this blog will only focus on classical OTB time-controls. Its applicability for online time-controls will therefore be rather limited. Time-management in blitz may have some overlap, but the skills required for successful online speed-chess are vastly different from those that you need for OTB chess.
1. How I got into time-trouble
a) My own poor time-management
2. The subject of time-management in literature
3. Too quick
a) Impatience
4. Too slow
a) Indecision
b) Atelophobia
5. Other types of irrational time use
Conclusion: How I deal with my time now
1. How I got into time-trouble
When my club were looking to form teams to enter in competitions and asked me if I wanted to join in, I said yes before the question was finished, before I had stopped to consult my parents if this was okay, and even before I even knew whether I'd be able to make it or not. How could I resist: I simply loved playing chess, and now I'd be able to play the game with some other players from my club. One of them, who was a year older than me, was already a very strong player, and I hoped that I'd be able to follow in his footsteps. I was already one of the stronger players in my club back in the day.
I don't remember how any of those games back in the day went, but I vividly remember wanting to attack in one game with a closed centre and and getting back-rank mated right away. It's been a long time ago, but this is what I recall from the position:
In a different game I tried to emulate an old computer program that taught chess. It played the Scandinavian and always used to beat me. So I tried to do the same. I don't recall the exact moves of this game either, but I largely remember how I got myself in a losing position quickly:
I lost another game because I sacrificed two pieces for checkmate, when my opponent only took the first one and saw through my very transparent trap when I offered the second piece. And so he started sniggering the way kids do, and whispered in a triumphant way, "You hoped that I'd capture your piece, of course." He kept the first gift and subsequently won the game.
What ties these three games together is that in each of them I didn't think much. I played too fast in the way that starting kids play too fast, and in all games I was about the first in the playing venue to finish the game. Our coach (the same person who scorned me years later about my presentation of the Egyptian game) rubbed it into my face that I was playing far too quickly, and that I had to take my time. "You have 30 minutes on the clock! Why don't you use that time?"
Reporting on the tournament, our coach indicated that I "realised towards the end of the tournament that thinking really helps and scored two wins in the last two rounds."
When I played my games as a kid, my main issue was that I played too quickly and thoughtlessly. The compliment that my coach paid me in the report was helpful, but it didn't solve the issue completely. Playing too quickly had anything but vanished from my lexicon, and it's scarcely the last time I've ruined a team match by poor time-management.
In later years I discovered that several other things were costing me valuable clock-time, which lead to the issue that I burned up more clock time than I used for the game. Getting up, walking around, socialising with the people that I know, and smoking are sure ways to burn a lot of clock-time that could've been put to use much more efficiently.
When you hear the phrase "bad time-management," typically the very first thing that comes to mind is a player who habitually spends a lot of time and falls into time-trouble in almost every game that they play. You'd find many sources to agree with you: in Mental Toughness in Chess, Werner Schweitzer starts his chapter 31 "Good Time Management" with the words "Time" and "trouble." He then focuses on this flavour of bad time-management and provides a few tips on how to better deal with them.
Schweitzer isn't the only one who does this: in his video "How to Fix Your Time Management in Chess," Twitch-streamer and coach Jack Sarkisian also provides tips only on how to deal with burning too much time, as does Kamryn in her video "7 Tips for Better time Management in Chess." Or Dr.Can's "Stop wasting time!" I can recommend a lot of their tips, and I'll get to them in a bit, but I have an important addition to make to their material. Valuable as the tips they provide might be, they're solving a very distinct part of the problem. Let me illustrate based on two rather extreme examples:
Example 1:
You're a habitually quick player who lost many games because you play too quick. Your coach tells you that you always have to sit on your hands for at least thirty seconds, and you started following that advice. Now, you have arrived in a tough time-trouble phase in your game against one Nova Stone. You have only 35 seconds left on the clock, with 30 seconds of increment and no added time after move 40. The following position arises, and you're playing white:
The queen is attacked, and black wants to play Qh4 next. You have an obvious move that deals with both threats in 38.Qe5, so that your queen can slide back to g3. Will you spend at least 30 seconds on that move to appease the wrath of your coach, or do you perform that move right away to save up a little bit of clock time?
Example 2:
You're the reigning world champion in a world championship match. You're leading the match with +1 after 7 rounds. You've won a 136-move monstrosity in round 6 and drew in round 7 after 41 moves. It's one more round until the next rest day, and both you and the bags under your eyes are really looking forward to the day off. After a 17-minute ponder, your opponent has opted to evade a dry symmetrical position with the move 9...h5!?:
After 40 minutes and 41 seconds you decide upon the move 10.Qe1+. What are your considerations that lead up to you playing this move rather than the more automatic 10.Re1+? What are you even thinking about?
- Should go for the win, given that I'm tired?
- Do I accept a quick draw, given that I'm playing with white?
- Will my opponent accept a quick draw, knowing that it'll be one game less to push for an equaliser?
- Is my opponent going for an unbalanced position with 10.Kf8?
- If so, how should I proceed after that?
Forgetting the argument from authority that "Come on, it's Magnus," spending 40 minutes on this move is a lot. Can you justify such an insane investment of time?
The obvious answer is that it depends entirely on the situation whether or not you can follow an advice or not. But if you're looking for any excuse to justify not following good advice, you're not spending your time, energy and resources wisely.
Based on a 90+30+30 game, you have an hour and 50 minutes for the first 40 moves. You can spend that time familiarising yourself with the characteristics of the position, selecting your possible candidate moves, calculating things through properly, looking at opponent's threats and ideas, visualising the position several moves ahead of time, and making a decision based on what you've concluded during your thoughts. It's not enough time to do this thoroughly on every move, but you certainly have the time to come up with ideas and supportive arguments for the moves that you play.
You simply don't come up with these ideas and arguments if you use only 5 of those 110 minutes (save for an example that I'll be talking about later). If you can't support your move with these ideas, it's rather more like drawing lottery tickets based on their visual appeal and hope that the superficially best move is going to get you to the finish in pristine order. But we're not doing beauty contests. We're playing chess.
A share of opponents will habitually blitz out their moves until far beyond the point where they should stop. Many of them are youth players, and as indicated above, I've certainly not been an exception. In my post on Youth Players I spent a subsection to how youth players can topple themselves by bad time-management. The following position is taken from my game against Youth Player 8:
It should take no more than two seconds of contemplation to disqualify 25.g4 from your list of candidate moves. However, my opponent, who had a FIDE rating of 1800+ at the time, played it anyway.
The position was already looking rather dreary, which was also a direct result of having played this entire game too quickly.
Why do people play too fast?
There can be several reasons why a player is playing too quickly: arriving late to the playing venue, keeping up the pressure when the opponent is in time-trouble, or mirroring the opponent's quick pace, to name a few. These cases of playing too quickly are often sporadic and isolated incidents of playing too quickly, and it makes little sense to make a general statement of these. Except that you have to be aware when they occur and make sure that you're ready for them next time.
In many cases, the "perpetrator" habitually plays too fast. And there's very often a crystal-clear cause for the behaviour:
Impatience is the greatest waster of time.
- Nova Stone, "Yikes! My opponent is 11!"
I stand by that quote. It resonates very well with the story of the martial arts apprentice asking a master how long it'll take him to be the best fighter in the area, when the master keeps adding more years every time the apprentice says that he'll work harder (full story cited here).
FM James Schuyler has the following to say about the effects of this impatience:
[R]ushing through tournament games will stunt your growth as a chessplayer since your bank of thoughts and ideas does not grow in size and complexity the way it should.
- FM James Schuyler, Your Opponent is Overrated, Chapter 11: "The Clock"
There's no instant fix to impatience. It's is a very difficult personality trait to have to deal with, so rooting it out can be a long process that requires consistent effort over a long period of time. It manifests in bad habits, and habits are things that you can work at. Here are a few tips to help you get started on improving your patience:
- Study the opening. Don't just memorise the sequence of moves.
- Don't blitz out your opening moves. Take a moment to make a mental note with every move (your and your opponent's) about what the move does for the position.
- Write down your and your opponent's clock-times with every move. This will force you to take stock of your time usage and strip you of your alibi that you spent a lot of time. Youth Player 9 started thinking after he had made the decisive mistake.
- Practice any activity that requires you to sit still and do nothing.
- Don't start a new blitz game right after the previous one has finished.
These are just some tips to help. The real change has to occur in your mindset and your actions. And don't expect positive results on day 1. Remember that it takes a long time to master, and, to quote Robert Greene:
The fools in life want things fast and easy.
- Robert Greene, The 50th Law, Chapter 8: "Respect the process - Mastery"
As indicated in the introduction, the goal of the game is to beat the opponent. Running out of time immediately cancels out this goal, and any achievements and progress towards this goal is immediately lost. Generally speaking, burning aeons of time to find the best move will make it harder to achieve the goal. There are instances in which finding the one best move is critical for the result, and in those instances finding the right move is a matter of life and death. For the majority of the game, however, this is not the case, and it requires that you use your time wisely.
Playing too slow is what most players will think of when you mention "Bad time-management." As I indicated above, many writers and content creators will only focus on this, with good tips on speeding things up. Before I delve into these tips, let's first see a few things in action. These are the first 25 moves of one of my games this year. The playing tempo was 90 minutes for the whole game +30 seconds increment per move; no time-control at move 40 (my opponent in the first round didn't know this and flagged on move 41, which is also bad time-management), and it pays to note that my opponent was a 19-year-old player with a FIDE rating of 2000+.
My opponent played his first 11 moves quite quickly and found himself with almost five minutes of additional time right out of the opening. He had obviously done homework, knew which moves to play, and emerged with a solid and playable position out of the opening. Both sides had their imbalances their own favour, which would make for an interesting fight for the full point: bishop pair for white, better pawn structure for black.
Jack Sarkisian suggests to "Learn proper theory." This is of course very helpful advice and likely to raise your overall level of playing and understanding, but it needs to be clarified what "proper theory" means. Proper theory means more than learning the sequence of moves. It requires that you understand the overall plans behind them, and that you know how to take the game further after your book moves dry up. You can learn that in two ways. One is behind the board and the post-mortem, but learning absolutely everything in the tournament hall isn't efficient. Training games can work wonders here. The other one is to go beyond your Chessable courses and opening books and find full games with the opening lines that you play.
Such deep opening preparation occasionally results in a free point. This might feel like a waste of your afternoon or evening, but in fact it's the reward that your hard work pays off. In the short game below between Siegbert Tarrasch and Georg Marco, Tarrasch reportedly spent no more than five minutes total, which doesn't fall under "playing too fast" because he saved up on his thinking time by doing his homework before the game:
The difference between Tarrasch and my opponent in the game above was that Tarrasch knew very well how the game would go. My opponent didn't: he learned all the moves by rote, played them on autopilot, and found himself on foreign soil by move 11. He was on his own by this point and had to think for himself. And as soon as he was out of book, he started burning time like wildfire: 13 minutes on move 12, 38 minutes on move 16, 21 minutes on move 19, and he was living off his increment by move 25.
What happened in my game is very typical: my opponent was suffering from a dangerous combination of incomplete homework and indecision. He had stocked up on thinking time in the first 11 moves to compensate for this, but this didn't translate into a better understanding of the position, or into the best moves. Whereas I had used my thinking time to let the game organically unfold before me, my opponent came in fresh to the game after move 11, and found himself in a foreign land in which he had to find his way almost from scratch. The time that he had to invest to accustom to the new situation effectively cancelled out every advantage that he may have believed he amassed during the first 11 moves.
12.Qc2 wasn't a hard move and didn't warrant 11 minutes of thinking time. 19.Rxd8+ did change something in the position, but this decision can be made well within 21 minutes. The only really difficult move to play was 16.e4, because there's an interesting alternative in 16.c4!?. But spending 38 minutes on this one non-critical move alone is outrageous, and I had two cups of coffee during this time.
What would've helped my opponent in this situation is a very solid advice by Shereshevsky as mentioned in The Shereshevsky Method to Improve in Chess, Chapter 15: "Resulting moves." This is advice is at its core a caveat to the practicality of Alexander Kotov's variation tree (well described in this blog) during practical games, and an attempt to improve upon it for the tournament player. While a structured way of thinking through complications has its undeniable merits, implementing it can burn up a lot of time and energy during a game, even those with a 30-second increment.
This is how Shereshevsky suggests that white should've approached the situation:
- Taking stock of the situation:
White has two candidate moves (an adequate term, also proposed by Kotov): an interesting but possibly risky move in 16.c4 that might require a lot of calculation, and a less critical but most likely solid alternative in 16.e4 that's probably safe to play. Looking at the clock, white has 77 minutes left for the rest of the game. - Candidate move selection:
White's move choice depends on whether or not 16.c4 works. If it doesn't, or if it's not clear whether it does, then 16.e4 will be the move to play. - Planning:
What Shereshevsky advises here is to set a deadline. A realistic goal would be to not go below 65 minutes of remaining clock time. Presuming that the selection of candidate moves would have taken about two minutes, that would leave another total of 10 minutes in which to calculate and decide upon the move. - Calculate:
Spend all efforts for the upcoming ten minutes tunnelling in on 16.c4 to see whether white can make it work. - Decide:
If the conclusion about 16.c4 has been reached before the deadline, the decision is easy. But if by the end of these 10 minutes it hasn't been clearly demonstrated that 16.c4 works, white should firmly commit to the alternative 16.e4. No second-guessing himself, no looking back, no regrets.
This method would've done two things for my opponent. Apart from giving him a more confident ground on which to base his practical decision-making process, it would also have saved him over 25 minutes of clock time for this one move alone. You can listen to the entire Finale of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in that time.
Understanding that indecision is the root of my opponent's abysmal time-management in this game, many of the tips that you can find online immediately become inadequate to address the problem. The homework was inadequate, so playing the opening moves quickly didn't help, and especially blitzing them out was more likely to do my opponent a disservice rather than anything else. There was hardly any thinking on the opponent's time possible. Knowing when not to think is certainly helpful in saving some clock time on moves like 12.Qc2, but it doesn't cure someone of their indecision, and the saved time is very likely going to be burned over another move.
For further reading: in Training for the Tournament Player, Chapter 1, "A Chessplayer's Strengths and Weaknesses," Mark Dvoretsky shows a good example of the influence of irrational use of time, when his student Nana Alexandria spent over an hour on a set of five moves that shouldn't have taken more than ten minutes to perform. However, the absolute king of indecision is Friedrich Sämisch, who lost all 13 games in the Nordic Championships in Linköping 1969 on time (increment was still a thing of the future back then):
Atelophobia is one of those beautiful Greek words that you never heard of but know the meaning all too well. It's the fear of making mistakes.
Wanting to do things right is of course an admirable trait. Everyone has heard the glorification of mistakes and their learning opportunities, but a mistake and a failure rarely feels like a positive experience. The reason why you want to analyse your mistakes is because you don't want to repeat the unpleasant experience of failing, and the failure contains the lesson what went wrong.
The excess of not wanting to fail is perfectionism. This is quite clearly not a good trait when you're pursuing your goals. There are numerous examples of players who get into severe time-trouble because they don't acknowledge that there's such a thing as "good enough." Here's a clear example:
Pascalle Monteny became Dutch national champion in the Girls U12 section in 2014. Five years later, she found herself stagnated at a rating level of around 1500. Her perfectionism and fear of making mistakes caused her to completely freeze up and lose this important game against a much higher rated opponent. In 2014, Duson used to be lower rated than Monteny, but had overtaken her by over 500 rating points when the above game was played. Whereas Monteny appears to have stopped playing chess since the start of the pandemic, Duson went on to achieve the WIM-title in September 2025.
The examples of insecurity-induced indecision paralysis are abundant. Fighting it can take a very long time, especially because in many cases there's an enormous mental barrier to allowing yourself the luxury of making mistakes and accepting that it's okay to mess up. But if you don't want to become a Sämisch, a Monteny, or my opponent, it's well-invested time and energy to work to eradicate your indecision. Here are a few tips that you can use:
- Practice time-bound decision making.
This is the type of decision-making that I discussed above, when I proposed a method for my opponent to save over 25 minutes of clock time. You can also do it yourself. The Woodpecker Method proposes this type of practice, but Puzzle Rush Survival can be a great front for this as well. Depending on your level, you can set the timer for the first 10 puzzles to two minutes each, one minute, 30 seconds; whatever works and is appropriate for your level and personal circumstances. After the time is up, you have to make your move. - Guess the move.
This is a great exercise that you can try for yourself when you're following live GM games, like the World Championship, or the Tata Steel Chess games in January next year. Choose one game, spectate the game with the engine switched off, and try to guess the move that the GM will play. After the game, you check your choices with the engine. - Practice making quick decisions in real life.
Most day-to-day decisions are quite inconsequential. What to eat on a normal Wednesday evening, turning left or right when sightseeing a new city, whether to wear a blue or black sweatshirt to do your groceries today; if it's not a critical decision, just practice doing it fast. - Use the process of elimination.
If in your game you have three candidate moves, and you can quickly write off two of them as clearly bad, then it's easy to pick the third option. - Be aware of the consequences of indecision.
Indecision burns up the candle of your time without giving anything in return. Any positive effects of indecision are accidental at best. While it's not as bad as impatience (because you'll at least form ideas that can be used in other games as well as your home analysis), the result in your chess-game will remain the same: no points on the score-sheet.
5. Other types of irrational time use
I'd like to briefly mention a few more cases of irrational use of time. Some of the more obvious ones are to spend more time away from your board than actively engaging with the game. I mentioned some of these above, but it pays to list them here again. Getting up and getting a clear head can be very useful in forcing yourself to be in the moment, but if you're always walking around the playing venue, it's going to cost you a lot of clock-time. The same goes for socialising with your friends (which is actually not allowed in many tournaments), and also for smoking during the game: smoking a cigarette takes up about five minutes of time that you don't spend at the board. (There are other obvious physical and financial reasons to discourage smoking, but to each their own. I'm just saying that several minutes of your clock-time go up in smoke.)
Dwindling thoughts also have a good habit of negatively impacting your thinking time. In my case these are most often songs or pieces of music that urge me to play them entirely in my head. At times I let them or even force them to run, but when I need thinking, I have to switch them off and tell myself that the only thing that counts here and now is the position in front of me and the moves that I will be making on this board today.
There are two other things that are quite common are arriving late, and allowing the opponent's pace to influence your own. They both happened during one and the same game that I played last year. My opponent arrived to the tournament venue 40 minutes late and started blitzing out his first 20 moves. I allowed myself to be tempted to follow his flow, resulting in a very uncharacteristic tactical oversight on move 13:
During the game I recognised that I was unfocused, and that my opponent's being late and quick move pace impacted my game negatively, but I failed to act accordingly on time. That's my own fault, and the mistake I made was my own mistake. It also teaches a few things that I've known for a very long time but forgot during this game. First of all, I should play my own way, not my opponent's. And second, unnecessarily mirroring the opponent's time-trouble is a recipe for disaster. My opponent has no choice but to think quickly, while my abundance of clock time doesn't inspire the same killer instinct and can lead to very bad decisions, like 13.Qc2??.
Conclusion: How I deal with my time now
By now I've seen numerous cases of irrational use of clock time, by my opponents and certainly by myself too. While I personally don't consciously use a planning for my clock-time in the way that many online sources recommend (15 minutes for the opening, 30 minutes for the next X moves, etc.), I write down the time on the clock for every move. Even though I still walk around a fair bit, I spend much more time at the board than I used to do a couple of years ago. Sometimes I make and write down my moves in a terrifyingly slow pace, just to force myself to be conscious of what it is that I'm doing. In the same vein I practice breathing exercises before the game and at the board in an effort to shut out any external influences.
Good luck with your own time-management!
