Losing on clock most games. Stuck at ~100 ELO.

Hi,

In my opinion you’re going about time management incorrectly. The point of longer time control games is to primarily help you improve your thought process, the secondary benefit is improving your thought process also allows you to find better moves more often. Time management can easily be fixed by just forcing yourself to move faster, however doing so results in worse moves over time which will likely result in you losing the game not necessarily by time but by the position, unless you are able to flag your opponent. However if you solve time management by improving your thought process the quality of your moves doesn’t suffer nearly as much while your move rate also improves.

The reasoning is, you’re able to more quickly evaluate positions and make a decision on your move more accurately and quickly and more often ideas will jump out as more obvious to you. Your mind actually slows down when you don’t have a solid, methodical thought process humming in your subconscious during play, and it’ll also make your moves more erratic as a result. If you pause the bullet/blitz, focus instead on solving puzzles, playing Daily chess, and/or 15|10, and just focus on say the CCT move method (look at all Checks, Captures, and Threats), given some time you’ll improve your thought process, more quickly and accurately evaluate positions and be able to come up with good moves more consistently. Your speed chess will improve. 

You will struggle trying to play both fast and better chess simultaneously. It can be done, but it’s a long frustrating road to walk.

-Jordan

Set up an account on Lichess.org.

Play a few games to get the feel of the interface.

Go to the Puzzles section.

Start playing puzzles. 

Do at least fifty.

Play more games. 

See how much more often you are finishing with 2 minutes left rather than 0 seconds.

Hi,

I know I'm a bit late to this thread but here's how I went from 800 bullet rating to 1600 and became a much faster player.

I'm not sure if you're heard of the variants server on chess.com at all? It's really fun and there are some awesome variants out there. 

Anyways if you are completely focussed on speed training, I might recommend you try some hyper time controls in 4pc and Chaturaji (and other variants). I became the #1 player at Hyper Chaturaji (2500 rating) and then came back to bullet chess to find I was severely underrated.

However, I would like to stress what a few users have already said:

It's not so much pure speed that you need to be looking to improve it's an ability to spot tactics and decent (it doesn't have to be best in bullet, just not losing) moves the majority of the time. 

Easier said than done right? 

Yeah, absolutely but although it's rather cliched; in chess practice really does make perfect. 

Make sure to make the most of the free puzzles and maybe try doing the 3min puzzle rush and aim for 15ish at first? 

If I'm ever online feel free to dm me or invite me to a game :) 

Good luck with your progress! 

Edit: Here's a funny game I played earlier today to stress the point: https://www.chess.com/game/live/65760716157

If you notice the timers (may have to go back a move, there's a weird bug with game timers right now.) I took a total of 20seconds throughout the whole game to beat a 2000 (either a tad overrated or perhaps they were having an off day) player in rapid. 

This was possible simply by having a decent understanding of the position and playing satisfactory moves, by no means super accurate. 

In addition to that tactics puzzles have helped me improve my tactical vision and enable me to spot and play tactical strokes without all that much thought. 

This wasn't intended to be a brag about my obvious awesomeness but merely a showcase of my general points. 

I actually started out playing this game with all premoves because I was annoyed at myself for losing a bunch of previous games on time so I set out to be as fast as I could without blundering. 

This is how it turned out 8) 

Probably the final update. While I'm still somewhat stuck around 160-200 rating, the particular issue I was facing seems to be mostly fixed and I've been wanting to try some longer formats because the time feels right. My ability seems to fluctuate dramatically and I'll miss really obvious stuff, but other times I'll beat a much higher rated friend. Only worry is that even against the computer with no time controls I still make horrible blunders sometimes, probably from some external time pressure that's the reason I want to play blitz so much in the first place.

Do the longer time controls and do not rush your moves. Playing a few slower games will help you more than 100 more blitz games.

Play 15|10 time control.
Use all your time before move 30 and finish the game on increment.

The only way to get better at blitz is to get a deeper knowledge of the game, and this is something you will not achieve by playing blitz. Simple, heh?

When you make blunders and your rating is 200, I don't know that you should be blaming the clock for that.

I'm blaming time pressure, not the clock. Might sound like the same thing, but time pressure can be caused by things other than the clock. The whole reason I'm playing blitz is I feel like I don't have time for anything longer, so playing longer games still results in time pressure and distractions on my mind.

Anyway, it also doesn't help that the only videos I've been watching much are Chess Simp 100 rated challenge videos and Hikaru's Disrespect Speedrun videos. Don't think I've seen a single normal well-played chess game.

Try correspondence chess (know as "daily chess" here). You have literal days to think, and you can play out lines on an analysis board (with chess engine disabled, obviously).

Be sure you aren't procrastinating to play chess, though.

Most importantly, never get your king out early.

To chess.com: Please raise the puzzle limit for a free account to a sane amount. You're not getting anything out of your restrictions.

Yeah, with the myriad of places to solve chess puzzles for free online it does seem weird Chess.com would restrict them here for free accounts. You'd think it would be far more beneficial to not give a reason for players to go elsewhere for their chess needs.

-Jordan

Honestly, I know you said blitz is what you value most (or smth like that), but honestly it might be easiest to improve with it if you play bullet and rapid as well. Bullet will speed you up and let you enjoy your time playing chess, and rapid will teach you how to play, which will help because you won’t get stuck so often (your intuition will get better and so you will have a natural feel for how to play).

So playing bullet and rapid might help your blitz.

Just my thoughts…

I think the place to start would be fundamental skill building. There are lots of resources on Chess.com as well as books to help guide you with general principals of chess. It's difficult without being able to have you talk out loud your thought process during a game to see where the problem is. For example, in one game I looked over, there was a piece retreat by a piece attacked by a pawn, but the thinking spent on that move was 23 seconds, which is a substantial chunk if playing 5 minute blitz. Maybe start reviewing your games and look at the timestamps over to the right and see which moves were the slower ones, then look at the position and try and figure out WHY the move took longer. Say for example I look at one of my games, and I take a long time on a single move, perhaps there were a lot of variations to calculate. Perhaps it may have been a position in the opening and I may not have known how to proceed because I was unfamiliar with the development patterns of that opening and I just plain don't know where to move next. There is a saying in music, that if you can play it slow, you can play it fast. The way I think about this in chess is that if I have put in the grunt work of playing slower games using a systematic way of thinking (beginning with elementary ideas of space, time, force etc), then as I hone those skills and they become more of a subconscious process, the speed will take care of itself. 

But bongcloud is OP. And so is 1. h4, 2. Nh3. Hikaru said so.

don't you mean 2.Rh3?

Of course not. That just blunders your rook like a child's first time playing chess. Nh3 defends against fork and baits a bishop attack developing your rook. Much more smarter.

"much more smarter"

Nh3 is terrible, at least Rh3 is funny

also Rh3 has had better luck by top GMs

also, it doesn't defend against a fork cuz there isn't a fork to defend against there

lol possibly...

It's extremely fast paced.