Botts played in the days before sudden death time controls.
You should, if prepared, play a line of stuff without too much thinking until you get to an unfamiliar spot, when you need to start looking and calculating. Old rules of time management are pretty obsolete.
Botts played in the days before sudden death time controls.
You should, if prepared, play a line of stuff without too much thinking until you get to an unfamiliar spot, when you need to start looking and calculating. Old rules of time management are pretty obsolete.
Thanks. Though, being only 1400 or so, my line of stuff is pretty short. If I do recognise an opening then maybe ill get 4 moves in and thats it. So its pretty early, that I start thinking: general principles are all good for that stage. "I don't know what to do now" gets substituted by "I should develop toward the center"
But with sudden death time controls, time is more of a factor. It seems to me that some general principles around time use are also useful. If we can narow the specifics of a game position to guiding principles, surely we can do the same with time management. In the event, therefore, that I have clocked up 3 mins on one move (in say a G/45), a general principle saying that 3 mins is probably enough should be useful. Even a rudimentary "divide the game time by 40 moves and aim for that" is a better bench mark than nothing at all, surely...
blake, the link is broken. What was it?
I think this may be the newer link: http://www.chesscafe.com/text/time.pdf
Spending time in the opening robs time from the middlegame when it will be sorely missed.
There are many reasons to use some time in the opening, especially if you hope to entice the opponent into certain lines - playing too fast can alert them you are in very familiar territory and some will seek to get out of your comfort zone as fast as they can.
The rule of thumb I always used before SD controls was to take the average amount of time per move and check myself every 10 moves - in a 40/2 tournament, that was 3 minutes per move so my target would be to be around 30 minutes for each 10 moves played. So I would look to use about 30 for 10 moves, 60 for 20, etc.
With SD, even with increments, that changes a bit, as does the flexibility to burn time in the opening to psych the opponent. But I don't speed up too much, because you get no cash rebate for the time you have left on the clock when you lose.
Excellent comments and outlook. Regardless of the time control, isn't there a math formula to apply for any time control?
I've been having alot of trouble managing my time in slow games: I simply play to slowly. After a bit of research, I stumbled upon this notion of "Botvinnik's Rule" which states that in "normal" openings (the ambiguity of that notion aside) you should spend rougly 20% of your time on the first 15 moves.
Of course this is a guideline or principle like any other, and the complexity of the position should dictatehow long you spend on a given move. But such benchmarks are useful to indicate "more or less" whether you're spending too long or too short on thinking.
Is this formulation helpful? What other benchmarks do people use? To help, at the outset, calculate more or less where they should be at what stage of the game? (I'm talking slow games here!)