Forums

How long do you spend deciding upon your moves in online chess?

Sort:
jlconn

"Sweating blood" ...

That's it, exactly. I find - and I think that I am not alone - that I have two destructive moods while playing correspondence chess:

  1. I don't sweat blood: I am so far removed from my opponent, that I lose any idea of a competitive edge, and I become detached from the struggle, and end up failing to put in all of my effort on every move.
  2. I sweat blood: I hunker down to really tackle the position at hand in one of my games (and I usually choose to do this at points in my games where I am already clearly winning, or when it is just not called for), and try to work out EVERY line of play, no matter how tedious the lines become. In the end, I have exhausted myself spending hours over one move, and I probably have three more games yet that need attention that I also intended to put the same amount of effort into, but I am just dreading having to go through that again.

Clearly all of the same knowledge and chess skills are at play in both OTB and correspondence chess, but OTB or even Internet live chess involves quite a bit of applied psychology of competition. I tend to play half of my games by bluff and bluster; I launch speculative attacks and often weasel my way out of the losing side of sound attacks with dubious diversionary operations that look like they might be strong. I can play three strong moves in a row, and even over the intertubes, I can feel the effect on my opponents, and vice versa. Correspondence chess requires a different type of discipline and consistent workmanship. If I ever do manage to play three truly strong moves in a row, that has no effect on someone who is not playing these "online" as if they were live games. They just match my good moves, to the best of their ability.

You just cannot psych out a skilled, disciplined correspondence opponent. As Fischer reportedly once said, "I like the moment when I break a man's ego." We can all feel that, at our respective levels, no matter how lowly, and it's easy to get addicted to that feeling, and to prioritize it higher than the hard work of improvement.

I like to sweat small amounts of my blood in short bursts, then replenish, and get back out there; when I am unable to treat correspondence chess in a detached way, as if I were conducting research, I feel like I am sweating huge amounts of blood constantly, for weeks, months, and maybe eventually years. So I think this may explain why some of us sometimes play too quickly.

bacem_g

Usually i watch the position fo few minutes (between 1 and 3) and make my move. If i can't come up with a good move in 3 minutes, i move to the next game and come back to the game later, and the process repeats.