Why are over-the-board time controls so long??

Gonna try to answer this once and for all.

The short answer is, you think.

the long answer... well let's take a look.

Let's assume you get this position. How do you continue? Well first of all, you have to assess the position. Black recaptured on f5 to prevent white's knights from getting to e4. You are white.

Black would like to:

1) weaken white's kingside with h5-h4.

2) Transfer the queen and/or rooks to the h file with attacking chances.

3) Play e5-e4 to open the diagonal and gain potential outposts.

White would like to either play f3 or f4. Obviously only f4 makes sense. Moving the pieces do not work towards a cohesive plan. 

So the first thing I'd like those who think otb takes too long to do is to ask yourself if you would be able to recognize these plans. What would you have tried as black? As white? The stronger players could spot f4 immediately for white. Moves such as Rae1 look good but do not really help. 

The only good plan is g3-g4. White needs to prepare this. No points for preparing b3-b4, since white's pieces do not work well on the queenside. So obviously black must try to prevent g4. And I'll go over the rest of the game, and if you still think you have excess time in over-the-board then feel free to suggest better moves or find every single variation.

Variations and annotations by GM Mauricio Flores Rios (selectively chosen by me, though ;) )

They are long for a reason. If you think you have excess time then you're not playing good enough chess. 

Good post!

yass queen slay - i mean, exactly. this is why you see super long time controls i otb tourneys, also why you see gms use that time to think for literal hours on end for single moves

The nice thing about 16.f4 is it makes black's f8 rook and d7 bishop look silly (because of the f5 pawn). Also, of course, allowing black to play f4 is almost never a good time.

The not-so-nice thing about 16...e4 is that all 8 minor pieces want to be improved (ok, the dark square bishops are not bad, but they have knights blocking them, so that's something that can be improved).

The nice thing about 16...e4 is that white is more centralized, and white's pawn break (g4) destabilizes black's structure (e4 will be pressured) while black's pawn break (b5) doesn't feel very scary.

That's how I process this sort of stuff, FWIW.

good job father b1z

very instructional post, i love it biz 💕

nice long analysis~
nyaaa~🦊

Yes this is exactly why I need to try 90+30

I need 180 months + 100 yeas

Good job!

just do it already my guy

Many chess tournaments have a prize, sometimes being over 1,000,000 USD (or 463,254,898,900.00 Venezualian Bolívares. I know that has nothing to do with anything, just pointing out how bad the inflation in Venezuala has gotten.)

Hey I have hmw to do...

what? no

i dont really know what do you mean by the "many" but when i ever was somewhere enough high on the result list to get some money from an otb tournament it was like: ok... i have lunch money for today...  and yeah the first prizes were much higher but something like two thousends USD not a milion... bruh... there are probably tournaments like that where is also half of the people IM or even more tho... but definitelly its not "many" tournaments

i meant tournaments that give out cash at all, and you cant say im wrong when i say that a chess tourney gave out a mil once cuz tata steel

no? what

I’ve seen tournaments with prizes of $1000 and if you get it you’ve basically broke even with travel and hotel costs. The biggest one was probably Chicago open but that didn’t even come close to $1M total prize fund

You make it sound like those tournaments happen frequently enough to trickle down to us normal people

tata steel anyone?