Time Trouble by Ovo Adagha

Perhaps one of the most terrible additions to modern chess, is the parable of the clock or as I like to refer to it the 33rd piece, perhaps the most important piece on the board.

How one handles the clock ,most probably determines his or her fate in the game at hand. The chess clock, above everything else measures one’s strength of character, ones ability to perform under pressure and consequently it increases the stress factor during the game.
It is often said that no amount of training or preparation can arrest the destructive effects of time trouble on a chess player. To avoid its consequences, you must avoid time trouble altogether.

No one can contend against time.

One of the major causes of time trouble is inadequate theoretical preparation. A player whose opening depth is shallow tends to spend a lot time over the board thinking and doing the wrong things. With such a catastrophic sequence in place , the end (checkmate) is only matter of time. Also it is crucial for one to gain experience; with more experience of different types of position you will have improved general assessment and intuition. It not unrealistic to want be able to play any type of position, however you have to be prepared to do the studying that such an approach requires.
On the other hand this is not a complete cure: Bronstein was said to have encyclopedic knowledge, wonderful intuition... and a marked time trouble habit. (Ed Apparently one should also know when to think and when to play what just feels right!).

For most chess players, time trouble wahala can become a habit. I recall watching a fierce Sicilian game at the 2003 NBL championships in Lagos .It was between two players in the opens 1 category. I had earlier walked past the board an hour before and it seemed to me as if the player with the Black pieces was meditating in a monastery. The way he was hunched over the board like a praying mantis caught my attention. I studied the position ,it was a middle game struggle and it looked OK to me. Black did not seem to be contending with some major decisions, so why was he wasting time?

About 45 minutes later , I came to view the board position again ,nothing had changed. He had made just one move the whole time. Meanwhile , White was getting restless and making some impatient gestures. Black’s clock was gradually clambering down the half hour mark.
I wished Black well and hoped he knew what he doing because it appeared the position contained some thematic innuendos ,of which only he was aware.

Twenty minutes later, curiosity lured me to the same board again. Good thing I was there, because the board almost exploded into my face ,with the flurry of activity going on there. It seemed that Black, having realized the time trouble trap he had willingly walked into, launched into a blitzing tirade ,albeit to make up for lost time. But what a formidable enemy time can be. After a few hurriedly executed moves, his position fell apart.
There is no doubt that some good players are prepared to put in a good half-hour or so in the early middle game in the belief that the position deserves it and the expectation that it will be rewarded by an easier - possibly winning - position later.

I remember when Kramnik beat Kasparov on the Black side of a Semi-Slav he criticized Kasparov for making a move after only quarter of an hour or so. He said that this was too fast, and that he would have taken what the position deserved "maybe one hour"(!).
In World Championship matches Botvinnik very often fell into time trouble in complex, dynamic positions conjured up by those wizards of the chessboard, Bronstein and Tal. Bronstein's time trouble, by contrast, was in relatively simple positions where Botvinnik had a small - maybe insignificant - positional advantage.

When viewed from another frame, time trouble does work both ways. Playing slowly stacks the odds against one ,but what about playing too many moves too fast?

I witnessed a classical example of this problem at the 2006 Gateway games. It was a match between Enugu and Cross River. The two protagonists were Ilonze (my Enugu team mate) and Ayi (Cross River). Both players were renowned blitz players (Ed I'm sure I'm in the minority but I haven't heard of either player) and barely 30 minutes after the game started ,it was over.

The reason? The two of them forgot that they were playing classical chess and went about the game in a typical blitz fashion. Tap ,tap ,tap ,tap and tap .To the uninformed onlooker, it would appear that the two gladiators were acting out an arranged script. And that they had resorted to blitzing to get over with it quickly .

But it wasn’t so. I knew for sure that there was no such arrangement. Ilonze had lost his previous game to one fellow from Bayelsa in a tight Caro-kann game, and was only too eager to make amends .So the game was real.

Unfortunately, his bad habit of blitzing got him into trouble and before you could say ‘wetin dey happen’  he had committed enough blunders to sway the game in his opponent’s favour. Not that Ayi was playing better, because the post-mortem analysis revealed some great errors on his own part. Perhaps it was his lucky day, perhaps the other side of time trouble did the hatchet job for him .

Such is the way of chess players who have fallen into the mechanical habit of blitz chess. For them, its all about time trouble and playing against it. Playing too slowly or too fast has its reciprocal implications on the chess player. I don’t entirely agree with the argument that no amount of training or preparation can save one from the conclusive blows enacted by time trouble, because I believe that the chess player in question can affect the processes leading to time trouble. Either positively or otherwise. Ultimately he or she becomes the beneficiary of his timely or untimely conduct. In the final analysis, like in everything else about life,its only a question of time.