Time Trouble: The Hidden Devil of Chess

"Time trouble", or Zeitnot, is a phrase every serious chess player knows all too well. More often than not, it's the go-to explanation when a game slips through our fingers. Someone loses a +4 position? The first question we ask is: “Was it time pressure?” And when the answer is yes, we almost nod in acceptance, as if losing a winning position is somehow excusable when the clock is the culprit. Despite its frequency and impact, surprisingly little has been written about this silent game-changer in mainstream chess literature. It lurks behind many losses, often without the fanfare or analysis it truly deserves.

During my journey from a FIDE Elo of 2100 to 2300+, one of the most critical areas I worked on was exactly that: time management. And it paid off. Many of my students in the past also struggled with the same issue: securing a winning position, only to fall apart under time pressure. Our work on managing the clock became one of the key reasons behind their breakthrough performances.

In this article, I share a few practical techniques that helped me and my students tame the clock.

1. Botvinnik’s Wisdom: Train the Clock, Not the Moves

In his classic One Hundred Selected Games, Mikhail Botvinnik offered an invaluable piece of advice: to overcome time trouble, one must play training games where the primary focus is on time usage, not quality of play or result.

This might sound counterintuitive. Why would you willingly play subpar chess? But the point is to make efficient time use a habit, until it becomes second nature. By consciously focusing on your clock during training, you gradually teach your brain to operate with a sense of time discipline.

Importantly, in these sessions, you're not just "playing" chess, you’re training a specific skill, something top-level coaches insist on. Know exactly what you’re training when you train.

2. Time Is Material

An advice I received years ago from a 2650+ GM was to treat time as material. This mindset shift can revolutionize how you approach the clock: treat time as if it were a tangible resource, like a pawn.

Think of it this way: in an equal position, if you're up by 30 minutes on the clock, that time advantage can be roughly equated to a +1.00 on the evaluation bar. It's not a perfect science, but it creates the right mental frame. You wouldn’t casually give up a pawn, so why treat time any differently?

This shift is even more relevant today, as modern time controls grow shorter, and precision under pressure becomes increasingly important. Additionally, during classical tournament games, I began noting down the time after each move. This simple habit dramatically increased my awareness of where I was spending my time. Over time, patterns emerged, and I realised that many of the positions where I’d burned several minutes didn’t actually require deep calculation. In hindsight, a large number of those moves could have been played intuitively, or “by hand,” without any significant loss in quality.

This awareness helped me identify not just how I was using my time, but also when I was overthinking unnecessarily. It’s a powerful exercise I recommend to anyone struggling with time trouble.

3. Knowing When to Calculate: The Art of Timing Your Effort

Not every position demands deep calculation. Learning when to spend time and when to play "by hand", using natural, intuitive moves, is one of the most valuable time management skills in chess.

But what are "natural" moves? That can differ from player to player. One way to sharpen this intuition is by studying typical plans and ideas in different pawn structures. By studying classics and reviewing model games in the openings you play, you’ll begin to see recurring patterns that make your decision-making faster and more confident.

Now, about critical moments: These are the moments where one decision can drastically alter the evaluation. It is important to slow down, pause, and make the right choice in such moments. Recognizing these moments is an art in itself, but with enough exposure and experience, your intuition will improve.

An exercise for the reader:
Examine the position below where it is black to play. Can you identify whether you should play this position intuitively (“by hand”) or if this is a moment to calculate variations deeply and find a forced win?

The position above exemplifies what Steinitz famously taught: combinations naturally arise when a position is already strategically winning. This underscores a crucial principle that if the position is not yet strategically won, it’s often unwise to spend excessive time hunting for a forced win, as it may simply not exist. A common cause of time trouble is exactly this, wasting valuable minutes searching for a decisive combination in positions that remain unclear, balanced, or are still developing strategically.

Final Thoughts

Time trouble isn’t just a bad habit. It's a deeply ingrained weakness that can neutralize even the sharpest calculation or the best-prepared opening. Like any skill, mastering time management requires intention, practice, and the right methods. There’s a well-known insight in chess: if you play at a good pace since the beginning, you might occasionally make a second best move, or even a slightly subpar one, but if you fall into time trouble, you're almost guaranteed to make a serious mistake. And that mistake can easily undo all the hard work and accuracy it took to reach a winning position in the first place. In other words, it’s not a smart trade off; trading time for perfection early in the game often leads to collapse under pressure later on.

If you’re consistently getting into trouble with the clock, don’t dismiss it as inevitable. Train for it. Plan for it. And most importantly, respect it. Because in chess, time is not just a resource, it’s your second king.