Playing too slow and getting into zeitnot, or playing too fast and making poor moves are consequences of bad time management in chess.
Along with being able to find and create good, strong and creative plans during a game, and with being able to spot and correctly play out tactical, positional or strategic ideas, time management is the essential skill of every strong chess player. Knowing how and when to use your time, when to stop and think, when to speed up is a critical skill which can be improved!
I have tried to assemble several useful pieces of advice regarding how to accomplish that:
– pace yourself; too fast is worse than too slow – take your time to play well every move. Weaker players often start thinking and playing good moves when they are already worse!
– apply knowledge by thinking – newly acquired knowledge takes time to process and it also takes practice to implement properly. If you rush through your games, there is a high chance that you will miss out on utilizing what you spent hours learning!
– use most of your time in critical positions – critical positions decide the game so it makes sense to devote most time to them. If you sense that the nature of the game is about to change, take your time and figure it out!
– use the opening to save time – chess games have three stages, openings middlegames and the ending. If you know the opening moves by heart, you save time! Build a solid repertoire to avoid entering the middlegame with half your time gone already.
– win the endgame in advance – the endgame is impossible to memorize as there are too many positions which could occur, but learning its principles and practicing it will make you much faster and you will often know how to play it out perfectly a tempo!
– don’t search for the perfect move – this is hard. Don’t spend too long trying to make something work. I’ve done that several times. Play the “ok” move instead. In the long run it pays off.
– write down time remaining on each move – very important for improving your play and your time management. This will allow you to see where you are wasting too much time unnecessarily or where you don’t spend enough time.
– blitz doesn’t make you faster, slow games do
– don’t show off
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