TIME MANAGEMENT IN CLASSICAL CHESS: WHERE TO SPEND YOUR CLOCK

By Venugopal Ramamoorthy — tournament chess player and creator of ChessDiary

A large share of lost games at club level are not lost because of a lack of chess knowledge. They are lost because a player arrived at move thirty with a few minutes left and a complicated position, and the blunder was a consequence of the clock, not the board.

Good time management is a skill that can be trained, and the first step is knowing where your own time goes. This guide covers the common causes of time trouble, a way of budgeting the clock, how to play when it runs short, and the scoresheet rule that matters if you are recording a game by hand.

WHY PLAYERS RUN SHORT OF TIME

• Spending too long on the opening. Thinking for twenty minutes on move eight, in a position where several moves are fine, burns time that you cannot recover.
• Recalculating the same line. You check a variation, get distracted by another, and return to the first one without having learned anything new. The thinking is not progressing.
• Fear of choosing. When two moves look equally good, you keep searching for a reason to prefer one, even though the difference is small.
• Not distinguishing important from routine decisions. Treating every move as a critical moment means no move gets the attention it should.

A SIMPLE WAY TO THINK ABOUT THE CLOCK

Instead of a per-move allowance, divide the game into zones and decide, roughly, how you want to treat each one. The right numbers depend on your time control and your style, so treat these as starting points to adjust from your own games:

A useful pair of checkpoints is to aim for roughly half of your base time remaining at move 20 and roughly a quarter at move 30 in a 40-move time control. These are not rules; they are a way of noticing early that you are behind schedule, while you can still do something about it.

THE CRITICAL-MOMENT TEST

Before spending a lot of time on a move, ask: would a mistake here change the evaluation of the game, or would the position stay roughly the same whichever of my top choices I picked? If the position will stay balanced with any of your reasonable choices, pick the move that is simplest and safest, and move on. If it is a decision where a wrong choice loses material or a good plan, spend the time.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE SHORT OF TIME

1. Switch to safe moves. Prefer moves that keep your king safe and your pieces defended over moves that create complications.
2. Check forcing moves first. At each move, quickly check the opponent's checks and captures. This takes a few seconds and prevents most time-pressure blunders.
3. Simplify where it is safe. Trades reduce the number of things that can go wrong. Do not trade into a lost ending, but do trade into a clearly good one.
4. Use the increment, if there is one. With an increment, any move played faster than the increment adds time to your clock, so a run of quick, safe moves can rebuild it.
5. Do not premove or move automatically. Time scrambles are exactly when automatic recaptures and ignored checks lose games, including the back-rank mates described in our back-rank guide.

THE SCORESHEET RULE

In over-the-board games you are normally required to record every move. Under the FIDE Laws of Chess, however, a player with less than five minutes left on the clock, and without an increment of 30 seconds or more, is not obliged to keep recording for the rest of that time control. In that case you are expected to reconstruct the missing moves as soon as possible, usually using your opponent's scoresheet. Check the regulations of your own event, because local rules and organisers vary.

This matters for anyone who keeps a game diary. The scoresheet for a time-scramble game often has gaps, or handwriting that deteriorates exactly where the interesting moves are. It is worth taking a minute after the game, while the moves are still fresh, to fill in the gaps. See How ChessDiary Reads Messy Handwriting for what to do when a sheet cannot be read.

TRAINING YOUR CLOCK SENSE

• Note your time at a few points in each game. If your event allows it, write your remaining time next to moves 20, 30 and 40 on your scoresheet. Over a dozen games, a pattern appears.
• Find your most expensive moves. After the game, mark the moves on which you spent the most time and ask whether they were critical moments or routine ones.
• Practise with a clock. Play rapid games or analyse puzzles against a timer. Calculation under time pressure is a skill that does not develop from untimed study.
• Decide your opening time before you sit down. Knowing roughly how fast you will play the first ten moves removes a decision at the board.

If a review of your losses shows that the mistake came after you had less than ten minutes left, the real problem happened earlier. Look at where the time went in the first twenty moves, and you will usually find a small number of moves that cost most of it.