The psychological side of conditional moves.

I played those snail paced correspondence postal games some more than

55 years ago.  Conditional moves  were very useful for me and I would still use them now.

Too bad we cannot use them in vote chess.

I think there's another psychological effect of using CM (if I only new how to make them, that would be sweet).

When you are playing stronger opponents, it's much more interesting for both when you're handicapping the game by making sure your opponent gets less time on their time control, say 25 minutes for you, and 5 minutes for your opponent. BUT, when playing these games, you may have the tendency to sort of adopt your opponents' time pressure, and at the end of the game, you may still have about 15 minutes left, while your opponent has about 8 seconds, meaning you probably could have played much better, had you been able to totally disregard your opponents time pressure, and play in your own tempo. I'm so bad at chess, that I've fell into this trap on more than one occasion. Might not screw up things for better players, and might not work in correspondence chess at all, but I've even fell into that trap when going from several 2/1 blitz games in a row, only to see that an opponent has made their move in one of my correspondence chess games. I access that game, and sometimes blunder, feeling that I have to reply quickly to a complicated position.

I wonder if the fact that I dont even know what conditional moves are outside of the online chess option in some way contributes to my relatively abysmal live chess scores.

If I put in, let's say, 3 or 4 CM, and my opponent only follows the first two, does the CM sequence stop where the opponent fails to follow the predicted sequence?  In other words, he does the first two and then something else, and the game comes back to me at that point.  I hope I explained that well.  I was thinking that - what if, despite the opponent doing something different, the computer keeps PLAYING my previously indicated moves!!!  What a panic that would be! LOL!  Any reassurance?

Many years ago when we all played postal chess, I used "if moves" to quickly end a game.  Here is one example:

In this position I played a move with the addition of a series of "if moves" and my opponent immediately resigned!