Training Study Q: Have you ever spent 20-30 minutes examining one hard position?

When I play daily games (and correspondence games), I play 3 games max, and I keep the positions on physical chessboards.  It's not at all uncommon to spend several hours on one move over the course of days.  If it's the opening, I will look at every recent GM game that reached the position and play them out, and I will watch some YouTube videos (always get multiple perspectives) if it's a variation I have not played in daily before.  In the middle game, there's more than enough to think about just trying variations of candidate moves...and there's no reason not to take those variations out to 10-15 moves (and not just in a casual way) to see how the positions develop.  In the endgame, it's back to book techniques, etc.

You will never have this opportunity OTB, so if you want that depth of understanding, you have to do it in daily games.  What you learn in the daily games will translate to OTB positions as well, and will swing games your way.  "The Kmoch is built around the e4 break...when my opponent tries to break back queenside, a timely a4 can delay their end of the race by several moves" is the type of knowledge that is highly useful to have and not something you want to wrestle with OTB in your head...because deciding to push kingside pawns or play a defensive a4 first is the kind of decision that will take you a long time OTB.

This is not much different from GMs doing engine prep...the difference being that they have all the opening/endgame stuff already baked into their understanding and can drill down on details of exactly what they want to accomplish more than we ever will.

Thanks for the feedback!!

Curious.  When you set up your Daily/Correspondence games on your physical boards, do you move the pieces around as you consider candidate moves and the variations that branch out?

Or do you visualize everything (without touching pieces) in a concentrated effort to simulate an OTB classical time control game?

I spent an hour on one move in an OTB game.

I rarely set up physical chessboards for correspondence, but always look at recent GM games in the opening. For some games, I have gone through every game ever published in Chess Informant that reached the position of interest.

I’ve mostly stopped playing correspondence because it is time consuming.

@btickler’s routine is not uncommon for those serious about such chess.

I play them on the board, and in fact if I decide on a variation I like that has several possible branches later on, I will advance the position to the branch points one by one and dope them out.  Another analysis opportunity you won't get OTB, so take full advantage in daily.  The key is to garner insights that stick with you in OTB games, and nothing sticks with you like deep analysis.  This is the difference for GMs as well, I feel.  Those that prep engine lines and forget the move order are shortcutting their analysis a little too much...if they were going deeper the move order would be embedded in their understanding ("I need to play the bishop back to b3 before starting the kingside assault or I'm going to get c5 at an inopportune moment", etc.).  Then they play a game, a mistake happens, Magnus punishes it, and that memory ensures the GM will never make that mistake again.  But why not just do the work in advance and avoid having to lose to cement that lesson?

I think this is how Magnus does so well.  His understanding is just way deeper in general, and he seems to analyze for his own understanding and growth, not to prep for somebody's pet opening line.

This scene is not typical, but does occur in my correspondence practice. I perceived the position had reached a critical point, and we were past the databases. I spent a fair amount of time—at least an hour—with the position on a real board, taking detailed notes, and reviewing some relevant passages in Stean’s Simple Chess. I did win the game.

Yep, and this is the type of learning that really sticks with you.  That critical point and all the becomes locked into your chess knowledge.  Will one ever learn them all?  Not even close .  

For 3 games a long coffee table can do wonders.  It also keeps you from snacking during commericials .

That's a nice chess set for studying and playing games.  I may have the same set.

I must confess that I don't feel much when I win or lose an online Daily game as I do when I play a real life rated OTB classical game.

For me it's about the game itself...was it a beautiful game, without flaws?  That depends on both players.

If I was playing Magnus and he blundered his queen and I won, I would be disappointed ...like it was a ruined opportunity for a really great game...

Daily games (well played) are a great way to get beautiful outcomes.  But yes, time consuming.  I played a good amount of my daily games here on chess.com in 2013 when I was recovering from surgery and had literally all day to spend on the games.  In fact I spent so much time on them that often I was making conditional moves, and just waiting to pounce on opponent's moves when they came in (and by "pounce" in daily I mean that I'd sometimes only review the move for 10-20 minutes because I was so ready for it ...).  I'll probably never have that opportunity again.

Another confession.  Testifying to my surrender to the excitement of modern chess combat of action packed rapid and blitz games.  Although I still refuse to play bullet.

My sin:  More often than not... I play Daily Blitz!

Now I have no idea how long my opponents take in thinking about their moves in our Daily games, but many times I bang out moves pretty quickly.

I compare it to the various ways to eat a meal.  Some people take their sweet time with each bite, savoring all the nuance and delicacy of the flavors of their food.  Then you have caveman eaters who are like Doberman Pinschers and they basically inhale their food in a mad rush.

I gotta tell ya, if I was the Daily player who diligently used Opening Explorer and other resources, and then also spent considerable time on critical positions assessing candidate moves and their variations, and still lost the game to a casual Daily Blitzer, I would not be a happy man, lol.

Hahaha. A blitz junkie, you say? Note the number of games. I've lost at least 1000 from database errors that corrupted them, seem to have lost or never had the games played on the first site where I played regularly in 1998-1999, and exclude from the database most of my ~50,000 bullet games, allowing many of the 2 1, however, since that is essentially 3 0.

Most of my forays into blitz and bullet were:

- Me showing somebody who came over what Live Chess is like

- Short lived examinations of silly things like the Hippo, etc. 

I have dabbled with the idea of playing more blitz, but I know that the way to really get "good" at blitz at my level is to narrow down to as small a number of openings as possible that offer complications and then just play the heck of out of them exploiting people's lack of knowledge (see:  Blackmar Diemer Gambit).  I think this really hurts general OTB play, though, and it's just not my style...you get really ugly games that way a fair portion of the time...I should face facts though...for anyone that thinks blundering pieces "ruins" a game, blitz is never going to be truly satisfying.

Let me just be frank.  What gets my chess juices flowing is the competition of OTB rated classical games.

I don't know when, if ever, we get back to the old normal of OTB chess, so maybe I won't have that thrill anymore.

The only reason I would spend 20-30 minutes on one position in my chess training session is to get ready for OTB combat.

If I can't play OTB, I must say that I do get my adrenaline pumping on online rapid and blitz games.  Sure, they are full of howlers and blunders, but that's the fun of it!!  I growl when I get flagged from a won game, but that comes with the territory.

I only want to train hard for classical OTB.  That doesn't make me a chess snob, does it?

I think it makes you normal.

Studying a position for 20 - 30 minutes is quite fantastic.  Based on your ratings, it is a habit that has served you well.

Once I'm down to fewer games, I think I'd like to adopt that habit.  Thanks for the great share!

Often I spend over an hour, sometimes a few hours analyzing a game with time control of at least 3 days a move.  

I actually watched Magnus streaming the latest titled arena and he lost a game in under 10 moves when he fell for a premove trick.  That's not really chess .  Just my opinion.

Yes.

Once I spent at least 30 minutes (maybe more like an hour) trying to solve a pawn endgame.

After I thought I had done a pretty good analysis, I checked the book's analysis (which was extensive), and I had screwed up... so then I reviewed the book's analysis + what I'd analyzed to come up with some lessons and I tried to understand the position and the important points of it all...

... because there was a similar pawn position in a different book that I remembered that I wanted to try to solve. So I tried to use what I learned on that position... and failed... but I failed in a really annoying way... the concepts and key points I'd spent so much time extracting from the first position didn't actually apply to the very similar looking position from the 2nd book.

So then I had to try and understand the difference between the two positions, and why certain ideas won in one instance but failed in another... and this was a pretty annoying exercise, but in the end I finally worked out some answers I was satisfied with.

The whole thing took, I don't know... 4 hours.

Was it worth it, in terms of chess? Probably not... I think the moral of the story is I like puzzles, and sometimes I don't know when to give up and I spend too much time on a problem (this would have been better to spread out over a few days at least).

Well, there have been forum posts and threads devoted to the question of whether playing and studying chess extensively is worth it in terms of spending one's time in this limited life we all have.  That's a hard existential and spiritual question.

But is spending 4 hours differentiating between 2 pawn endgame positions worth it in terms of chess knowledge which hopefully leads to improvement in game performance?  I don't know.

Maybe one can rationalize the training exercise as a serious cognitive effort to prevent future Alzheimer's.

Or you can tell your loved ones that you studying chess is cheaper and better than you being a drug addict.