Need help to eliminate a serious weakness

Hi,

I am looking for advice concerning a weakness in my play that I tried to eliminate for a few years, without success.

I lose a lot of games in this way :

- I use more time that my opponents (some players play like it is bullet even in rapid time control) at each moves

- My opponents tend to play weaker moves and little by little I get a winning advantage or a beautiful position
- But it take time to finish the game and I end up in a serious time trouble, playing only with the increment (I play 15min+10s in these days)
- My opponent knows his position is lost and try to play for tricks
- I make a huge blunder and all my previous hard work is wasted : often, the game is lost for me.

I don't know what to do. Just to give you some background, I am not a beginner, I am about 1700 OTB FIDE. I know that I must practice tactics and I do, I have a pretty decent 2800 rating in tactics on chess.com. The tactics I fall for in time trouble are tactics I can solve easily in a tactics training session.
I tried to play faster, but when I play faster I don't have enough time to calculate and I also blunder.
When I am winning, I don't relax, I know my opponent will go for counterplay or tricks.

I had a chess coach (IM) a few years ago, he agrees on my evaluation of my play: I tend to have better chess understanding that my oppponents but eventually blunder in my games. He told me to practice tactics, but so far, my weakness is still there.

Here is an example of such games where I fell for an "easy" trap at the end.

Sorry for this long post, and thank you for any help.

i too have weak points

sometimes i am too confident on speed chess, making me prone to playing bad opening. because i always learn to be a tactical and precise fast player which it doesn't always work as expected. just because i can be quick to see my opponent's mistake and can play the best response doesn't mean i always play that good.

there was time where i tried experiments to win bullet on time and ignore skills by playing several pre-moves in the beginning. however i made blunders instead, making me lose really fast. i was stupid enough to start these experiments in rated games, instead of trying them with bots or unrated games first.

my another weak point is i am easy to get bored by long chess. that's why i tend avoid rapid and longer chess time controls. in the other hand, bullet it too fast. i need more time to think. maybe i am just easy to be affected by mood. it really affects my performance.

i am just like some other chess players. sometimes i can't even execute my game perfectly when i am clearly in a winning position.

blitz seems to be my strongest point, but not that i am really good at it.

but the worst problem in my own perspective is how chess.com overestimate our ingame strength but underestimate our real strength...i can see it in their analysis (especially accuracy). this is a serious issue that potentially threatens innocent players' reputation

You're good enough to understand when I say to you that you should try to be efficient with your moves right? Losing tempo directly impacts the eval of the position... if you use 2 or 3 moves to do what you could have done with 1 then that's bad.

Ok, so now it's useful to realize how that applies to clock usage. Often players do things like spending 5 or 10 minutes to play a move they could have played in 1 minute. This is because the quality of your moves doesn't improve continually, you have to invest larger and larger blocks of time for each improvement. For example if we think of letter grades like C, B, A. Maybe your move is grade C after only 10 seconds, but grade B might require 1 minute, and grade A might require 10 minutes... and that's usually how it goes. Getting to the next level requires exponentially more time.

Also you should realize that in some positions it's completely useless to "upgrade" your move. If the engine says the top 5 moves are:

0.10
0.15
0.30
0.32
0.40

Then it makes no sense to burn 10 minutes to gain 0.05

---

Ok, but knowing this doesn't help you manage your time. To actually change the way you preform you need a way of practicing.

Get a collection of positions that have both tactics and positional solutions, and also vary in difficulty. If it's too much of a hassle to build your own, you can consider a book like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Chess-Exercises-Lessons-Strategy-ebook/dp/B001FSK3H6

Then what you do, is you take 5 random positions where you don't know the difficulty or type, and you give yourself something like 15 minutes.

Now you try to solve all 5 using 15 minutes total. To be good at this exercise, you have to identify whether the position is easy or hard, and whether you need to calculate or use general understanding. This is useful because it's just like a real game. In a real game you shouldn't calculate and calculate and calculate trying to improve your move from a B to an A if the position is simple. You need to save your long thinks for certain types of positions and this type of exercise will help you develop the habit of identifying when a long think is useful or not.

#1
"I know that I must practice tactics and I do, I have a pretty decent 2800 rating in tactics on chess.com. The tactics I fall for in time trouble are tactics I can solve easily in a tactics training session."
How much time do you spend when solving tactics puzzles? Can you solve tactics puzzles in 10 seconds? If not, practice puzzle rush. In 5 minutes you should solve 30 puzzles.

It's better when you make your practice mirror your ideal performance.

In other words if you figure out the average OTB game move should take ~3 minutes, then you should try to get puzzles that are hard enough that they take you about 3 minutes to solve.

If the puzzles you solve are easy enough to solve very quickly (like 10 seconds) then you wont develop the calculation habits you need to pace yourself during a real game.

#7
Agree, but 90|30 is hard to play online.
He wrote: "I play 15min+10s"
15|10 is decent, but needs the ability to solve tactical issues in 10 seconds

Thank you @llama47 for your advice on time management. I also read about the kind of training you propose in one of Lev Alburt books "Chess training pocket book", he calls this exercice the "Dvoretsky's training method" and consists in solving a group of 4 problems in 20 minutes. The book is also organized in such ways : problems are presented in groups of 4.

For the moment, my tactics rating on this website is 2800. And I also can do 30 problems regularly in a 5 minutes puzzle rush. When I practice tactic problems I use all the time I need to be confident with my solution. On hard problems I can think for 30 minutes long. This is to practice calculation and visualisation. I use puzzle rush for training pattern recognition.

The issue is that the traps I fell for like the one in the game above, are patterns that I know and it seems to me that 10sec should be enough to see that simple tactics. But of course it is black to play not white, so in reality I had less than 10 sec to see it. When I saw Qh6 : I realized that it attacks my h7 pawn with check, so I needed to defend. Then I saw that if I defend with the king, he can go back Qe3 to try to penetrate on the e file again, so I took some time to decide whether I sould play Kg8 or Qg7. In my opinion, 10sec is not much time to think about all of these things. But then I saw my clock was low and I played the move I "felt" to be good Qg7 not to lose on time. However it was a horrible blunder.

Particularly in long game (OTB) your stamina is a factor. You can't work extremely hard on every move and then expect yourself to be in top condition at the end of the game. You have to figure out how to spend less time (and energy) on easy moves while working hard on the important moves.

If you get down to a few seconds vs your opponent's many minutes, then you're going to blunder. Period. It doesn't matter who you are. So the problem to solve is not "what could I have done differently in that moment?" the problem to solve is "how do I avoid arriving at the moment to begin with?"

In other words don't get so far behind on the clock in the first place.

Thanks for the kind words. Note that I never thought badly about my opponent play. I think my opponent is absolutely right to play for tricks since the position is desperate any way. I am the only guilty here

Thank you @llama47 I will work on my time management, then.

#15
Always check your intended move is no blunder before you play it.