Time pressure. Every chess player knows it, some of us even live with it. Having 2 minutes for 15 moves before time check is something like sign of such players. Everyone knows that preventing time pressures and better time management is good for the quality of one’s play. But sometimes we meet an opponent who falls into the time pressure. How to treat this situation?

There are a few general rules, let’s name some of them.

1. Don’t start to play as fast as your opponent has to!

This one is probably the most important one. Although during each tournament you can see many examples of the direct opposite. It is probably a natural tendency to play fast as many players think that playing their moves fast makes little time for their opponent to think about the situation on the board.

That’s true from the physical point of view. But chess is not only about physics. The psychology has much bigger influence, I would say. And from the psychological point of view the similar behaviour is a fault. The reason is that the opponent knows about his/her upcoming time pressure much earlier than it actually happens. So he/she has a lot of time to prepare for it and once his/her time pressure is here, his/her mind is ready to play fast and is focused on finding good moves quickly.

But your mind is not ready to change its “setting” at the moment of the opponent’s time pressure and to start playing blitz game instead of the game with classic timing. So you can become a bit nervous just because you created your own time pressure in your mind. You begin to look for good moves quickly and many many times it happens that in such situations players lose their games even if they have much better time on the clocks.

If your oppopent falls into time pressure and you have enough time, do not change your time policy. Think about your next moves properly and do not start playing a blitz game inside of the classic game!

2. Complicate the game as much as possible!

This is another golden rule for the situation with your opponent in time pressure. If the situation on the board allows it (unfortunatelly it is not possible sometimes), try to complicate the game – look for threats, small combinations, sharpening the position, increasing your pressure, sacrifice for initiative…

Each of these “techniques” creates new problems for your opponent and he/she has to deal with them. What is worse – he/she has to deal with them within a few seconds and it increases your changes to succeed. Sometimes even in the case when your threat is not correct. But is your opponent able to find it with his/her falling flag?

Of course, at the end of the day everything depends on the concrete situation of your board. So don’t lose focus on threats and nuances of your game having the above mentioned ideas in your mind. It would be a pity to play the game for a few hours and then lost it needlessly within a few seconds.

Photo’s author: frankblacknoir

White is a piece down but attacking. Will it be successful attack?

White to move.

I have decided to share good chess books, which help me, with you. The first one is “Chess Training Pocket Book II” of the authors Lev Alburt and Al Lawrence.

This book is focused on improvement one’s calculation skills and spotting tactic. It brins 320 training positions from different stages of chess games. So you can solve puzzles from complicated middlegames, but on the other side, the book contains also simple positions from chess endings.

The base of the book is development of chess thinking and also chess knowledge. By solving the tactic puzzles from the book, the reader will learn typical patterns and collect them in his memory. All the diagrams are instructive and based on real games.

“Chess Training Pocket Book II” contains also a kind of short manual “How to think”, which is very instructive and many players will find it very useful.

The readers of this book should not be absolute novices in chess. There is needed to have some chess background and some knowledge to study the book successfuly. So I would tell that average club players and the beter ones up to ELO 2000 could profit the most from this book.

It is something what is worthy of attention. I can recommend the book, at the moment it is my best friend when I am traveling to my office by train each day.

Chess Training Pocket Book II
How to Spot Tactics & How Far Ahead to Calculate
by Lev Alburt, Al Lawrence
Publisher: CIRC, 2008
Edition: Paperback small
Pages: 208
Language: English

If you follow me on Twitter you may remember I attented the first blitz tournament of new season on Friday. I have to admit it could be my first blitz tournament ever as I don’t remember if (and when) I have attended blitz tournament before. But I was looking forward to this tournament also because of the fact it was first occasion to play competetive chess after more than one month.

It was quite strong tournament. The average ELO of the best 10 players was 2091, my ELO is 1718 and my start rank was #15. At first four rounds I gathered one point, when I lost one game on time and another one in time pressure. This resulted in ‘bye’ in the round #5.

Second half of the tournament went better for me.In the round #6 I won quite easy game, then I lost another one against a fellow from my club. The penultimate round brought the best game for me – I am going to show it to you below. And the last game – I overlooked mate in two in much better position and I lost the game.

If I would have won the last game I would have finished on very nice 8th place. But any “if” is not counted. The last lost game resulted in my 13th place of 21 with 4 points from 9 rounds.

From the point of view how strong the tournament was, it is nice place. On the other side, I wanted to grab half point more. So I rate this tournament as an average one for me.

And now is the place for the game mentioned above. I had black pieces and I decided to play for win desperately. Here is the critical position of the game and black is to move. Would you find his move?

The eighth world champion Mikhail Tal and his games are very inspirational for many players. If you want to study more tactic and get feeling for ultra-dynamic positions and intuitive sacrifices I would highly recommend to study his games.

Tal’s sacrifices were not always correct, but they created mesh on the board and Tal was able to orientate himself better than his opponents in those complicated positions.

Here is one example. As you will see, black had a chance to draw the game, but he missed it under the pressure.

I wish I had that courage to sacrifice the bishop on e6 square in my games too :)