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During the first segment of a typical tournament time control…
Time trouble can be caused by either…
P1. Using way too much time on a few moves; or
P2. Using a little too much time on a lot of moves.
** Which of these two causes leads more games into time trouble, P1 or P2? And can the ratio of affected games be quantified (with mere estimates)?
Intuition from players experienced in tournament play is one usable source of answers/info.
Any hard data would also be great.
When I browse through Jon Speelman’s Best Games book, wherein he reports time used per move(!), it seems that P2 is far more common than P1. P2 is also my personal experience.
I have made a habit of recording the time after most moves in my games. In reviewing that data, my own experience is the games I’ve lost on time, I’ve more or less ‘forgot’ about the clock - in some form of analytical haze, and it’s happened as often from good as from bad positions. That said, I can probably count on two hands the number of games I’ve lost on time over the years at normal time controls.
However, a review of opponent’s clock issues reveals it is more the former than the latter. I think there are some players (some of whom I’ve played several times) who actually revel in time pressure.
“Former”? I take that to mean — P1. Too much time on a few moves. Okay, thanks.
And, when you spoke about ‘forgot’, I do not take you to mean that you forgot to press after you moved your piece on the board.
But your notated time data probably does not tell you whether your opponent’s forgot to press their clock after moving — or maybe you have a habit/policy of reminding your opponent to press when you can see he obviously forgot to press?
I will never feel comfortable in situations where the opponent forgets to press his clock after he moves. It is a competition after all; yet it seems a non-magnanimous way to gain an advantage.
I usually tell the opponent promptly on his first forgetting. But thereafter I just go about my business, and when I am ready to move I then tell my opponent to press his clock. So I do not delay making my chosen move just to let my opponent’s clock waste more of his time.
BTWay, I too notate my own clock times, but rarely my opponent’s times.
I notate my clock times by a plain copy of whatever the clock displays. Our well-known local Elo 2000 T.D. Fred Kleist (here near Seattle WA) records times by doing math (to convert to minutes used, I think). I do not want to do math during my chess games.
When I say I forgot, I meant that I got too engrossed with the game and ‘forgot’ to check the clock. I remember having one technically beautiful position that I guess I admired for something like 20 minutes, looked up at my clock and realized I had between 1 and 2 minutes to make 20 moves . . . I both messed up the position and lost on time with a couple of moves to the time control. My guess is that if I have lost, say 8 tournament games on time (which sounds about right), some variation of this probably happened 5 times.
I began recording times during the game a long time ago after reading through a game analysis by David Bronstein. Recording the game time was designed for several reasons. First, it gives a picture of what you thought were the critical moments of the game that required more thinking time. Second, it was designed to instill some discipline in thought. Third, it helped to show where mistakes were made.
Many of my opponents’ losses because of misuse of time are the result of using too little time on the opening or on a critical position. Once they get into trouble they slow down and spend lots of time trying to figure a way out when it is already too late. Had they spent more time being alert they might not have gotten into trouble in the first place.
My own losses because of time are because of spending a little too much time on a critical position trying to oververify my analysis. Another problem arises when I have not settled into the game and am spending too much time on simple opening moves while trying to get a feel for the game. This happens a lot when I have not played in a tournament for a while. Some losses are from playing in too many tournaments with faster time controls. I used to be better at these types of tournaments, but now feel a little creaky at times. Unfortunately, faster time control tournaments are often the only things around to play in. I have found that it is easier to adjust when you move from faster to slower time controls than from slower to faster games.
When I have enough time, as in a long time control event, I write the clock times down every move. In faster time controls, I try to write the times down every five moves. I recommend to my students to record the time in order to slow them down a little. I want to see how much time they are spending on individual and groups of moves. We often find that hasty moves are the ones that bring them down.
And can the ratio of affected games be quantified (with mere estimates)?