Interaction between time management and concentration

I just don’t understand how some of my fellow bloggers do it. Some are posting lengthy, almost daily essays, and apparently inhaling books like My System in a sitting or two. Others are dissecting USCL games and insults, or USCF politics.

Me, I’m just going to keep on keepin’ on, at my own pace, posting maybe a couple of times a month, on those rare occasions when I have a thought about learning chess that seems worth writing down.

Lately life has severely interrupted my chess hobby, darn it. My oldest son just turned 16 and needs help both with learning to drive and with school work. My youngest son needs help keeping up his workout schedule for the Physical Fitness merit badge, plus transportation to baseball three times per week. My wife’s graduate classes are keeping her frantically busy, and so I want to help her as much as I can. At work I’m preparing for several upcoming presentations at different universities, plus there’s the usual routine of urgent development deadlines every other week. Any finally, pressure is heating up to make progress on the 2nd edition of DIPUM.

(So why are you writing a chess blog anyway, you dope! Hey, chill.)

Phew, glad to get all that off my chest.

Now, about time management and concentration. Something very interesting happened in both my club games last month that I want to share.

First a little personal history regarding time management. In club and tournament games, I’ve been writing down my time remaining after each move for several years now. This accumulated record of my own time management has left me with several impressions.

• Moving too fast is not my problem. I always use almost all of my time, and my games tend to be among the last to finish at my club.
• Very often I run somewhat short of time in the last 10 moves of the first time control. In a 40/90 time control, it’s fairly typical for me to have about 7-8 minutes to make the last 10 moves.
• In mutual time trouble situations, I tend to come out on the short end. Basically, I stink at blitz.
• I often take long thinks.
• My long thinks are often the result of indecision in noncritical situations. Then after my opponent responds and the board situation hasn’t changed all that much, I tend to go into another long indecisive think.
• This last impression is the most subjective and iffy, but maybe the most important – my long thinks just aren’t productive. I have slowly come to believe that any time used after about 4-5 minutes is mostly devoted to mental floundering.

I have concluded previously that I would be better served by a much more even move-making pace. (Neither of my instructors seemed to have much sympathy for this view, but I’ve decided that in this instance I have a better understanding of myself than they do.) But it’s been hard to break the habit of taking long, unproductive thinks.

Earlier this summer, Dan mentioned to me a time management rule of thumb I hadn’t heard before. Use only 20% of your first time control to make your first 15 moves. (I think he attributed this rule to Bronstein, but I can’t remember for sure.) In a 40 / 90 time control, this corresponds to roughly a minute per move, less than half the overall average time per move, and much faster than I usually make the first 15 moves. I don’t remember the way Dan expressed the logic of this rule, but I think the idea is basically that, although it may be difficult to find your way through the opening, the moves still tend to be easier to calculate than what often goes on during the middle game. There are often several reasonably good moves to choose from, and choosing the 2nd or 3rd best often isn’t a critical error.

This notion stuck in my mind, and when September came I was ready to try one more time to alter my move-making pace. I decided that I wanted 10 minutes left at the end of the first time control, instead of 0, and that I would make the first 15 moves in 15 minutes. In between, I would make each set of 5 moves in about 13 minutes. I marked these goals on my scoresheet in advance.

Making the first 15 moves in 15 minutes felt very fast to me, but I managed it. It seemed to help me establish a good two minute per move pace for the rest of the first time control, and I did get to 40 moves with about 10 minutes left. No long thinks at all. I think the longest time I took on any move was around 4 minutes.

I won the game against someone rated 150 points higher. But that isn’t the really interesting part.

When the game was over, I looked up the from board around the rest of the room. It was 11:40 PM, the game had taken just over four hours, and only one other game was still going out of about 35 boards. And I had no idea! I was totally oblivious to what time it was, or what was going on in the room around me.

Now this was very unusual for me. It seemed to me that I had achieved a significantly deeper level of focus and concentration than ever before. After reflecting on this, I made a tentative connection to my altered pattern of time management. I wondered if adhering to a stricter pacing discouraged indecision and mental laziness, as well forcing a more urgent attention to the board on each move.

Now for most chess players, if it happens in one game it’s an indicative trend, but if it happens in two games in a row it must be an ironclad fact!

Sure enough, the next week I tried this quick opening moves, no long thinks allowed, even move pacing routine again. I scored my 2nd 150-point upset in a row. And again, when the game ended after 11:30 PM, I was totally oblivious to the time and to the rest of the room.

I really enjoyed playing these two games, and I looking forward to my next opportunity to try this time management approach.

Note that I don’t intend this post as a recommendation for anyone else to follow. I’m certain, in fact, that many players will react to this post by quoting Colonel Sherman Potter – “Horse hockey!” As I said, this experiment was based largely on a few years of personal observations about my effective and ineffective use of time in my own games.

My recommendation to others would simply be to get in the habit of always recording your time on your scoresheet. Over the course of many games, then, you will be able to form your own conclusions about your strengths and weaknesses in this aspect of the game.