@mouseonly said in #15:
> I'm talking more so about hyper because I pretty much only play hyper in the lichess Bullet rating category, but some of this, below, may apply to 1 0, as well.
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> Flexibility is important. So if you find your opponent to be a faster player, then you know you can't be taking your time as much compared to if you were playing a slower player. If you find your opponent to be a slower player, then you can probably spend a bit more time focusing on your own move quality to ensure that you are making good, quality moves so that you don't get outplayed in terms of move quality.. And also, slower players in the opening and middlegame tend not to be fast in time scrambles. But knowing to make these adjustments is already mostly subconscious, so you're probably already doing this subconsciously in games. You're really good at Rapid! I'm not too sure exactly what suggestions to make, but maybe try your best to anticipate your opponent's moves and your own next move and moves as quickly and well as possible.. As a personal example, if I'm playing people 100 points higher rated than me in hyper, it seems to me as though their anticipation (their speed and quality) is so good that it almost feels like they can guess my moves. Personally, if I'm playing structures that I typically don't play, then my anticipation instincts drop dramatically and I end up playing slowly (and worse moves).. for example, I personally rarely fianchetto my kingside bishop, so if I were to bust out 1.g3 as White, I would not play well throughout the entire game. To me, the word anticipation (in hyper) is about grasping each position throughout the game as quickly and well as I can, and then I have a good sense of what my next move and moves are going to be.. If I subconsciously sense in the middle of a game that I'm anticipating stuff well, then that raises my confidence, which is also beneficial. I tend to do well against lower rated players in hyper, and I really struggle against higher rated players.. I suppose my confidence drops against a higher rated player before the game even starts, because I expect that they will probably anticipate stuff better than me and outplay me.
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> Also, understand your own style. I tend to play slowly in the opening, which is my weakness. In a hyper game, if I am lucky enough to have the clocks equal (say, for instance, 15 seconds left for each player, where the position is still a middlegame), then that is where I am pretty good at making a lot of "safe premoves," or I guess "relatively safe premoves" would be more accurate—premoves that won't lose material.. in other words, no matter where the opponent goes, your premoved move will be at least okay, even though you have no idea what move the opponent will play (this "relatively safe premoves" thing is more effective in closed or dry positions, and also, doing "relatively safe premoves" is more for hyper.. tends not to apply as much in 1 0).
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> Typically, play at your usual pace, but once in a while you may have to adjust your pace based on your opponent's opening (and adjusting your pace subconsciously based on your opponent's speed is sort of what I brought up in the beginning of the second paragraph). For example, I happen to be terrible with 1.e4 d5 as White in hyper because Black's opening and early middlegame moves are extremely fast (Black is pretty much applying the "relatively safe premoves" idea in the Scandinavian Defense when it comes to the opening and early middlegame—well... even though though the opening and early middlegame for Black is not entirely premoves, of course, Black can still go extremely fast in the Scandinavian), which means I have to learn not to look for the most accurate moves possible when my opponent plays the Scandinavian in hyper, and therefore, I shouldn't really play at my usual pace, but instead, I should know to really try and pick up the speed in the opening and early middlegame if my opponent plays the Scandinavian in hyper.
yeah I usually find it quite difficult, often after game 20, to premove "safely" and I often blunder a whole piece for nothing. In arenas for example, I can play at 2300 ish level but after the 7th or 8th game, i'll start to lose against some 2000s or even lower.