Time management explorations

Intro

Everyone agrees that good time management is an important skill in chess. It can cost you games, it can win you games, remaining time affects your thought process, your mood, risk taking approach and many other factors.

There are two obvious common problems: playing faster than one should, and playing slower. I am mostly in the latter section. I tend to think carefully about my middlegame moves trying to find the best one, perfectionism style. And when I am in a bad situation I tend to overspend time trying to come up with some ingenious way to get out of that trouble, Houdini style. Is that a problem? I think so, because in time trouble the quality of moves drops notably and I can just lose all my carefully accumulated advantage and even lose the game.

In this post I want to verify that I indeed have time management issues, to assess whether it is harmful or not, and to conclude with some advice and techniques.

Plots

First things first, I wanted to verify that my perception of my time management is correct. For that I prepared several types of plots for my Rapid ChessCom games:

• Plot 1: plotting my time vs intended time spending policy (I used “gradual” policy: use equal amount of time for each of first 40 moves) for last 20 games
• Plot 2: plotting my time vs opponent’s time for last 20 games
• Plot 3: plotting average time for all games from 2024 against my opponents averaged time

Plot 1: vs gradual policy

Solid line is my remaining time by move number, dashed line - is intended remaining time (in seconds), under “gradual spending policy for 40 moves”:

From this plot it is clear that indeed, in the middlegames (say, moves 15-30), I tend to overspend my time and drop below the dashed line, spending more than my time budget implies: I’ve done this in ~15 out of 20 games.

Plot 2: vs opponents time

Let’s see now how I compare to my opponent’s time spending.
The same 20 games, but now solid line is my time, dashed line is my opponent’s time:

Again, it’s obvious that in ~15 games out of 20, my line is clearly below the opponent’s line.
Also, it’s noticeable that some people play very fast (5 games out of 20). They usually lose, but some of them even play well at that rate!

Plot 3: averaged vs opponents

And finally let’s look at the averaged line over all rapid games from 2024. Solid — my time, dashed — opponent’s time, as usual:

It’s clear that at move 30, on average I have basically twice less time than my opponents (3 minutes vs 6 minutes in 15+10 games).

(The dashed line becomes a little bit chaotic past move 35, I think that’s because many games end before that, so after move 35 there is less data and thus the smoothing effect from averaging is not that strong)

OK, so based on all of this I can definitely say that I am playing slower than a typical chesscom user in my rating range.

Time trouble impact

OK, so now I’ve confirmed this. The next question is whether I should fix it? I.e. is this really a problem?

I think this can be judged by the amount of mistakes that cost me games and were made in time pressure. In order to understand this I looked at the last 20 games that I lost and evaluated whether the ultimate mistake was a time trouble one or not. To classify a mistake as such I need to have less than 3 minutes on the clock and less than my opponent, or just under a minute (disregarding opponent time), and the mistake has to be a blunder, i.e. something that I wouldn’t do in normal circumstances.

Results were as follows: 9 out of 20 games were lost because of mistakes made in time trouble. And two of those were: missing a mate in 3 and missing a mate in 1! Of course it’s not that black and white and sometimes it’s not easy to tell what cost you a game, but I tried to be objective.

Ideas for improving from Axel Smith and others

Does that mean that if I fix the problem and start playing faster, I will lose twice less games? Unlikely, because if I play faster — I will make more other, not time-trouble mistakes. But it looks like a promising improvement direction anyway. I should aim for balance.

Axel Smith puts it like this in his excellent book “Pump Up Your Rating”:

The consequences of the mistakes made in time trouble should be equal to the consequences of the mistakes caused by playing too fast.

It’s an interesting idea, but I feel that it’s not very practical, because how do you exactly measure whether you’ve achieved equilibrium? Probably one should just trust their feeling on that and analyse mistakes and time management carefully.

Axel follows with other, more actionable and practical suggestions for OTB games, augmented with my comments:

• Never be late to the game: this just gives up time on the clock for no reason, plus is not good sportsmanship
• Write your time on the scoresheet (and analyse afterwards)
• Analyse if mistakes are caused by time trouble or not
• If you know an opening move by heart — play it immediately. (This was actually helpful for me, I’ve got a feeling that people don’t play moves quickly OTB, because it may be perceived like they are rushing or something. So many people spend 5-10 seconds even to answer e4 with c5! Just save those 5 seconds for when you really need them! Now I play the opening moves immediately, accumulate time and am not afraid of my reputation!)
• When there is one possible move — play it immediately (Leko rule). Obvious: but people sometimes ponder on the consequences of that only move on their own time
• Try to understand which position is critical and which is not. Spend less time on non-critical positions. What is critical? A good rule of thumb is to pay more attention when something has changed (or is about to change) irrevocably, like pawn pushes, piece exchanges, choosing the side for castling
• Accept that you can and will make mistakes because of limited time
• During an opponent’s move usually people think about strategy and more generic plans rather than concrete variations. But if the reply is relatively obvious you may as well start calculating the lines starting from that move, so that you can quickly play the answer. Another thing that my coach recommended for playing against someone in time trouble: calculate and make moves in pairs (this stops opponents from thinking on your time)
• When your opponent is in time trouble, do not play for simple tactics and threats, they are the easiest to parry. Play unforcing moves, improve your pieces and strengthen your position. Where there is plenty of choice, time burns like good oil

Another improving idea is to have a process-based monthly goal based on time management constraints. Say, I can aim to play at least 50% of games per week that “stay above the dashed line” in my graphs above, i.e. that I always use no more time than my uniform budget allows. It’s somewhat scary to commit to this goal, because of the potentially lost precious rating points, but likely the exercise will be very instructive and may significantly improve my play in the long term.

Notating time

Regarding writing time on scoresheets: I started doing it after I saw my opponent Romain doing it in Round 2 of La Plagne tournament. Here is my scoresheet from that game:

You see, after each move I put a number: time in minutes. Romain was cleverly converting everything to minutes, so it’s 78 instead of 1:18 — usually easier to see what’s going on without being too affected by those pesky Babylonians with their 60-based numerical system. Also, “78” is just two characters and “1:18” is four, easier to write! I adopted the same approach.

How is that useful? For me, it allows to analyse time usage right during the game: I can clearly see whether I’m on a way to time trouble or not, i.e. by move 20, 30, 40 I can estimate whether I am behind or ahead in schedule, whether I am spending too much time on simple moves, what is the general trend, etc. Also, it just keeps me mindful about time, since I am notating it on every single move. Judit Polgar did the same on all her scoresheets, BTW: she mentioned it in her book.

When recently I was playing on an electronic board in the tournament in Leyland, I knew that all my timings are recorded with seconds precision, so I stopped notating the time. But soo I started to feel a certain discomfort lacking that information during the game. I felt disadvantaged, so now I am doing this even when playing on electronic boards.

Outro

I’ll conclude with a collection of books/articles about time management that I found useful:

• GM Axel Smith - “Pump Up Your Rating”, Chapter 9: “Attitude”
• NM Dan Heisman - “A Guide to Chess Improvement”, Chapter 3: “Time Management”
• FM Nate Solon - post “Time Management” - https://zwischenzug.substack.com/p/time-management

By the way, I’ve generated those graphs using a homebrewn Python script. I am too lazy to convert that into a public website, but let me know in the comments if you want me to generate the same for your chesscom/lichess username (or maybe you have some alternative ideas for plots).

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