Chess Question: How do I play faster?

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rennur100

Hello Everyone! I have been doing competitive chess for about 2 weeks and have been to two weeks of chess club, my main problem I guess is that I take awhile on my moves to figure stuff out, like too long I guess because my one match finished on a draw and my opponet got mad because he wanted to play with other people. The other thing that causes this is I am very "particular" I guess, and I also have mild aspergers (if that helps with anything, just in case any of you chess players have autism and stuff). I guess I am more in tune with longer games? But anyway what are some ways that I can trainmyself to move faster? THE OTHER THING. Is that the people there know absolutely nothing about openings or tactics for that matter, so they always make some crazy opening moves and I am always thinking like "what in the world". 

 

But yeah in conclusion any ways to help me play faster? Maybe play some 30min games on chess.com? Maybe do 15|10?

pdve

It's not a bad thing to take your time to move. In fact it is a good habit. I for one have the opposite problem. I rush too much and make mistakes.

 

In response to your question about what to do when your opponents play crazy opening moves and you think wtf, I would recommend you learn a wide variety of openings and pawn structures. When I used to answer 1.e4 with 1..c5 I always used to want to play an open Sicilian. Since many opponents played Closed Sicilian or Grand Prix attack or some other side line, I gave it up in favor of the french defense. Then after I learned the English opening or started playing 1.d4 and faced the Dutch defense, I began responding to the Closed sicilian as if I was playing the English reversed and the Grand Prix attack like the dutch reversed. And it has worked great.

Martin_Stahl

If you are taking too long in casual games at the club, get a clock and start playing with it and you'll either play faster to meet the time control or lose on time.

 

That said, taking your time on many moves is a good thing for playing good chess. Playing faster is mainly only good if you are wanting to play fast time controls or have a limited time to play games.

Charousek_Fan

If you wanna play faster!! Simply go for Blitz chess....Play 10-20 serious Blitz chess with speed ( online).Only thing you have to do is to analyse every game !!! & always puts increment there because you takes some times.So go ahead!! ☺️☺️

MickinMD

I am awful at fast games and am trying to improve myself.  Those who are able to play fast see patterns better than me and that saves them from a lot of slow calculation. I've been trying to improve on patterns.  IM Danny Rensch's Patterns you must know video series here is helpful as are similar ones on YouTube. Tactics problems are helping me a lot. When I do Tactics Trainer stuff here or at chesstempo, after each problem I try to name the tactics used and look for the pattern associated with them: the name is important because it provides a "hook" in your brain on which to hang the information and quickly retrieve it.  The easiest way to learn the key Tactics patterns is to study the interactive examples at these two sites and memorize their names and the moves and patterns associated with them:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-tactics--definitions-and-examples

https://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html

I returned to chess this year after a long layoff and use my tactics rating at chesstempo as a gauge of my progress.  Here's where I am now and it shows how I'm seeing the board better - note that I hovered around 1500 at the beginning of the year and slowly worked my way up to where I'm now, hovering over 1700, my highest rating being 1737.6, currently 1722.3, and I try to work at least 5 problems every day (1993 problems done there in 2017, 65.08% correct, some problems also worked at chess.com):

null

 

If you're making moves within the agreed time limits, anyone who gets mad is simply being rude and irrational: if he wanted a rapid game he should have required rapid before it began.

A lot of people, including me, feel that the best chess requires at least 1 hr on each clock, but that's not usually practical.

BlackDeathRising
pdve wrote:

It's not a bad thing to take your time to move. In fact it is a good habit. I for one have the opposite problem. I rush too much and make mistakes.

 

I highly agree, for a long time I played primarily blitz and picked up the bad habit of playing way too fast. You may need to increase your time spent thinking a little for your club, but my advice is don't start playing blitz. I recently gave it up entirely, and am really struggling to slow down. I play 30/0 rapid on here now and a lot of the time I move so fast it's like I'm still playing blitz! It's hard to change, at least for me. Slow players take their time and pick me apart and it's really frustrating.

 

It's so bad with me that I often even rush during Daily chess. Really dumb! You ever play Daily chess on here? You might just find you are very well suited for it, and I find it fun. I suggest trying that rather than blitz. Just my experience, maybe. Anyways, good luck.

Jenium

 Try slow time controls, like 90 min + 30s/move.

SERGIOPAULOITZ

why is chess.com sooooooo slooooooooooooooooowwwwww?

 

joecielecki

My feeling on playing fast is I'd rather plot my strategy  slowly with few mistakes  than moving fast with many more mistakes. 

m_connors
SERGIOPAULOITZ wrote:

why is chess.com sooooooo slooooooooooooooooowwwwww?

 

I don't know. It only took you about 2 years and 5 months to respond to the previous post!!  wink.png

dhirallin

Here are my tips for playing faster in blitz, which I think can be divided into "Short term improvement" and "Long term improvement"

Short term improvement: 

I think the most important factor is how you spend your time during the opponents' move. During the opponent's turn, you should be coming up with at least one candidate move for the event in which your opponent plays something quiet or something obvious. This is your "default plan" that you can fall back on if you don't see anything better after your opponent's move.

When it's your turn, you should be primarily focused on acknowledging and responding to your opponent's move. Either defensively or offensively. For example your opponent's move may open up a weakness which provides a better option than your default plan. Or it may force you to change your default plan to accommodate their threat. Either way, if you've come up with a decent plan during your opponent's time, then you should only have to look at the one move that has changed, rather than the entire state of the board. 

Long term improvement:

This is all to do with how you analyze your games afterward. It goes without saying that the #1 way a chess player improves is by analyzing their own games. However the extent to which you improve comes down a lot to your analyzing technique. Most players will go through their game afterwards and say "I made this mistake, I should have done this, this and this, and I shouldn't have done that, that and that". However after a few months they will simply forget about 80% of what they learnt. I believe this is because they are not properly considering the "context" surrounding the mistakes or plans. When looking at a particular move you need to say to yourself "When the relevant pieces and pawns are configured in this particular way, then these are the possibilities and pitfalls" and you need to really drill those shapes into your mind. It helps to also start thinking of the algebraic notation of the squares like "When the opponent's queen is on g4 and their knight is on f5 then I need to be wary of X", or at the very least identify when pieces are on certain files or ranks. Effective analyzing technique is the heart and soul of chess.

ProphylacTicTac

On lichess, I was able to boost my playing speed in a few days after losing 50+games against maia1. After a few dozen flags, you start playing faster, and after a few days like this, I was able to boost my bullet rating by 200 points https://lichess.org/@/maia1

dogprogrammer11

When I play blitz, I usually run out of time at the end, just before I get to checkmate my opponent. Any suggestions on how I can save my time during the start and have more time at the end?

PromisingPawns

It all lies in pattern recognition and opening drills.

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