Middle-game collapses

Here are some useful examples of games where I just couldn't find the right time to find a swift tactical finish. Any concrete tips on how to improve, besides just 'study more tactics'?

https://www.chess.com/blog/K_A_L_E/finding-ones-killer-instinct

Your blog post is one of the best things you could do. You analyze your games, talk yourself through your thought process and mistakes.

But I have to laugh a little when you're worried about not having enough of a killer instinct just for not finding a mate or tactic in a complicated position where you have only a minute or two on the clock. If you could do that consistently you'd be a professional player right? And most of the time you did realize you had tactics... I'm sure if you had 30 minutes on your clock you'd win, but that's not how speed chess works (and when the clock is low it's a game of speed chess).

And I guess that brings me to my last point... and that's I've noticed the 2200 crowd pretty consistently makes use of practical advantages like the clock. I would be interested in knowing the clock times when you e.g. won a pawn. In other words I wonder how much your opponent was speeding up or slowing down on purpose.

Oh, but I have heard of exercises where you get positions from endgames (technical and tactical), openings (tactical and mundane), tactics, and positional puzzles.

Then you mix them up. If you don't have a partner to do this for you, one way to do this would be to put images of each position in a folder, then do a slideshow with a random setting.

Anyway, and you give yourself something like 15 minutes for 5 positions... of course you don't know if these positions will require calculation, planning, or whatever, just like a real game. And you have to budget your time to get through all 5 positions, just like a real game.

If you did some kind of exercise like that, and talk yourself through your thought process and mistakes as thoroughly as you did in your blog post, I imagine that will help a lot.

Thanks so much for the feedback, and I really like your flashcard suggestion. I think you're totally right that the higher rated folks I've been playing have been playing the clock, although a lot of them seem to just play quickly consistently, and only use their time once they get slightly worse, rather than using it trying to find/keep an advantage. 

 On that 1st game ?....just Qxc4+. They move off and u renew + w/ Qxc4+ again. Now I think it's over.

Good one farm_hand

Guess what KALE ?....I won a 2650 player yesterday !....after s/he won IM ig1 (2491) and IM AlexBattey (2648) earlier. I checkmated them in a 5-min blitz miniature....tho' I'm pretty sure that they probably let me do it   ::/