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tips for 90 plus 30 tournament

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DCthedestroyer

Hello everyone

I have a 90 plus 30 tournament in 3 days. I have prepared a bit.

How do I practice and some general tips for long time controls like this would be helpful.

I am rated 1516 FIDE and my starting rank is about 30th out of 48 but I am 1900 chess.com rapid and feel like I can play well.

My time management is my biggest concern

bobby_max

Don't bathe for as long as you can stand it and eat onions and garlic before the event. Your opponent will crumble before move 3.

Fang_05

Try to concentrate a lot in the start. Then in the endgame, 30 seconds you get every move should be enough for you. But if you play differently, this might not help.

llama_l
DCthedestroyer wrote:

I have a 90 plus 30 tournament in 3 days.

My time management is my biggest concern

That's not something you can fix in 3 days.

You also didn't mention if you're playing is too fast or too slow.

llama_l
jocajelisavcic wrote:

Then in the endgame, 30 seconds you get every move should be enough

In the days of adjournments, players would analyze a single endgame position for hours.

Fischer famously stayed up all night analyzing a position in his match against Spassky.

You freakin' kids and your ignorance of endgames, smh.

llama_l
DCthedestroyer wrote:

How do I practice and some general tips for long time controls like this would be helpful.

I've written really long answers to this in the past, but yeah, 3 days is nothing, so in general...

To start, look at your online games and notice when both players spend time.

For example I clicked on your most recent win:

https://www.chess.com/game/live/116588986317?username=dcthedestroyer

And you start taking long things around move 15... that's extremely normal. I typically think in terms of moves 15-25 being the most costly on the clock... and once you realize this it will help you set standards for yourself in terms of how much time you want to have on your clock on a certain move number. Then during the game you can speed up or slow down to meet your personal standards.

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The more advanced answer is to play a lot of practice games and puzzles where you consciously pay attention to what and how you're calculating, and take notes. For example there have been times when I've calculated the same line over and over (up to 10 times, maybe more), but other times we can quickly decide a line is right after just a little thought. Why? What's the difference? And what goes on in your head that makes you trust one line but not another? There are many situations like this but you have to turn your conscious attention to them and think about it for yourself.

It's also important to play in 90+30 games (like you're about to) because you'll gain new insights... there will definitely be some great calculation tricks or techniques you use... but also some bad ones. Pay attention to it during and after the game and you can use that information to become better.

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As a simple example, maybe you can sacrifice a knight for checkmate, but you can't calculate all the way to mate. Sometimes it's enough to realize you're going to win a few pawns and the attack will keep going. So when you realize you've been calculating for a while, and you've stopped finding anything new, you can sacrifice now and worry about the details later because you're confident you'll at least have compensation.

Or other simple tricks... like if you're under attack and there are 3 defensive moves you can play. One of them you're not sure, so you keep calculating and calculating... but it would have been faster to do a little calculating on all 3, because you would have realized the other two definitely lose, so now you can confidently play the move that you're unsure how it turns out.

So yeah... sometimes it's good to have a lot of candidate moves, sometimes not. And sometimes it's good to stick with one line a long time, and sometimes it's good to do a little calculation over a lot of different lines... during a game these decisions will be habit or intuitive, but before the game (through practice) you can improve your habits / intuition... and the first step is paying attention to what and how you calculate, and then afterwards asking yourself if it was good or not in each situation.

1e4c6O-1
USE YOUR TIME
Create a checklist for calculation
Get enough sleep and drink tons of water
DCthedestroyer

thanks. i qlay too slow