Stopping Speed Racer

or Triggering a slow down

Welcome back to Chess in Small Doses, a Substack about adult improvement in chess. I have a problem. Call me delusional but at my best I think I can hit USCF 1900-2000, but sadly at my worst I play at a 1300 level or lower. The reason why… I play too fast. Sometimes I make instant moves in under a few seconds. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve come to instantly regret these moves. So why can’t I just slow down? Believe me I’ve tried. But only recently did I find anything that actually worked. Let’s get into it.

Regrets, I have a few…

A few weeks ago I had this position in front of me. Black to move and lose.

I was trying to move the knight on b6. My first thought was Nd7 but then I started comparing moves. Black is worse, but I’m trying to hang on and fight. Looking for a way out, my mind saw Nbc4 has a threat to b2 and could then also block the LSB. I thought it was a way out and played it honestly within 2-3 seconds of seeing it. The moment my fingers left the piece, I saw the mistake. Nbc4 Bxc4 Nxc4 Bxf6 and I’m dropping a rook. Game over. Looking it over I was obviously worse, but there were more resilient moves like Ng4, Nbd7, or even Rxd4 to consider. The quality of the thought isn’t the issue. Instead, let's focus on the short amount of time I gave myself before moving.

I’ve written about using our time well previously. In that piece I noted that chess players can come in two flavors: tortoise or hare. We might play too slow in general, or we might play too fast. I have always been the too fast type. It is also what has made me a good ER physicians. All of us ER types are essentially ADHD. It makes us good a dealing with the chaos and the noise. It’s not unusual for us to be juggling 12+ patients at once with new ones coming in all the time forcing us to shift our priorities and pay attention, right now, to a completely new patient. As a consequence we learn to act like that dog in the movie Up constantly looking for squirrels.

Telling us to “slow down” is like telling someone anxious to “calm down.” In the history of the world, those words have never helped anyone in crisis. I know I need to slow down. What I would like is someone to help me understand how to do it. Don’t tell me to perform a blunder check. That’s like asking me to remember what you just said while I’m in the midst of playing a video game. Not going to happen.

In fact the speed of thought I sometimes have has been a double edged sword. Sometimes I can see tactics 4-5 moves deep quickly. At the very same time, it’s damn near impossible to stop myself from moving once I see it. Over the last few years I tried what almost all of us do… I tried harder.

I’m Thinking Here!

I started studying thought process. I read books, articles, and listen to podcasts. I wrote a post summarizing what others had said about the thought process in chess. My personal favorite was Dan Heisman’s Two Move Trigger idea, which is actually a pretty solid piece of advice. He said either prove you have the best move OR play the best move you can find in the time you have. Sounded great at the time, but I’m still trying to learn how to pay attention to both my thoughts AND the clock!

So instead of using someone else’s idea, I wrote my own. I came up with a variation of a basic chess thought process and made the 3x3 Method. This seemed to work for my mind as reminders of what to pay attention to. Or at least it did for a minute. Then habit kicked back in. I found I could not reliably stop myself from running away with calculating my next move immediately after my opponents played. Very frustrating and very humbling. I just couldn’t stop myself and slow down.

You see the issue isn’t having a checklist or not. The issue is what has your attention, and how much of it. When my full attention is on a position, it’s very hard to think about my thinking. Add in any sense of time pressure and you have a potent recipe for brain farts. Here’s what trying harder got me.

The week after my Nbc4 debacle, I had another game. After 12 moves, it’s White to move. I’m happy with my bishop on b5, blocking the pawns and pinning the knight. I want to attack the pin and my opponent knows that. He played Bd6 to prevent Ne5. Folks, in less than 1 minute I looked at this and decided that Ne5 Bxe5 dxe5 was good for me and I played it. Do yourself a favor and see if you can find a better move in 2 minutes (answer below).

I reached this point with 1h 20 minutes left on the clock in a 90+30 game. That means I spent a total of 16 minutes on 12 moves (including a trade of Queens) for about 1 minute 20 seconds a move. I went on to lose this game after 54 moves with just under 1 hour left on my clock. Afterwards I looked in the mirror and asked myself why was I even playing classical chess at all if this was the speed I was going to play? Working harder at slowing down wasn’t working for me. So I decided to do something different.

This is an intervention

Fast forward two weeks later after my intervention and we have this position. I’m playing Black here in a 30+20 online game and after 54 moves I have a winning position. Note the times on the clocks.

I took 1h 32 minutes to play those 54 moves for an average of 1 min 42 seconds. I didn’t always find the best move, but I did find moves that kept the advantage. I played a shorter time control and took longer on average per move. The additional 20 seconds per move may not seem like a lot, but in my world it is. As a direct consequence the quality of my moves went up. As I wrote before, it’s better for amateur to be less wrong that it is for them to be more right.

Here’s another game I played after the intervention. After 12 moves, we have this position where it’s White to move.

This is a 45+45 game I had prepped for, so the first 5 moves went pretty quickly. After the first 5 moves I had 43:42 on the clock. The position above is move 12, a full 7 moves later and now I have 33:29 on the clock. Those 7 moves took roughly 15+ minutes, or an average of >2 minutes a move. The next move, Be5, I had calculated as winning for White and had seen a plan forming about 5 moves back. Slowing down meant I could see what was weak on the board and how to attack it. That d5 pawn had become my target and I spent those 15 minutes trying figure a concrete way to win the pawn. I went on to win the pawn and the game in 15 moves, partly due to going slow and partly due to luck in how my opponent responded to the opening.

That’s two games with a higher average time per move leading to (hopefully) higher quality moves. Let’s talk about what I did.

WTF

I credit a few people for helping me cobble together a way to get my ADHD brain to slow down. First is Aiden Rayner who recently talked about Blunder Checks on his podcast. After each move he recommended a “mantra” that you can repeat after each move as a prompt to pay attention to what has changed in the position. ( I wrote about that in Two Things.) Only recently he apologized to visual thinkers (of which I am one). Repeating words doesn’t work for me (or others). No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t remember to remember consistently. So Aiden suggested a physical trigger like a clickable pen or letting go of the mouse/trackpad. Physically engaging with something serves as the reminder.

Second is Noel Studer who mentioned using physical triggers in one of his interviews with Ben Johnson. He tries to avoid blunders by associating a blunder check with writing down the opponent’s time on his score sheet. Not a bad idea, but I’m much more basic than a GM.

Last is Dr. Can and his WTF checklist. The WTF stands for Weaknesses, Threats, and Forcing Moves. That was simple enough for me to use, but I made it even more simple by only focusing on the first two parts: weaknesses and threats.

I decided to use two physical triggers: writing down my opponent’s move and; writing down my opponent’s time. I associated a single action with each trigger. Trigger #1 - look at what weaknesses my opponent’s move just created. Trigger #2 - look at what threats my opponent’s move just created. After that I was free to let my mind go and find a suitable line of moves.

This intervention was not earth shattering or groundbreaking, but I wasn’t doing these things explicitly (or even often) before. I would just start thinking immediately after my opponent’s move and couldn’t stop my brain from calculating lines. Once I saw one that looked good enough, I played the move. Nothing feels worse than blundering that way.

Why the triggers work is that they get me to slow down and pay attention to one thing at a time. Part of the problem is that my mind likes to pay attention to a lot of things all at once. Adaptive for the ER, not good for chess.

The two physical triggers are easy to repeat for me. I was doing them in my OTB games anyway. Each one simplifies what is asked of me and makes the task much smaller. I don’t have to solve the entire position all at once, I just have to first notice what is now weaker in the position. When I’m done with that I write down their move. Then I move on to look at the threats that are now in the position. Again, I don’t have to solve the whole thing or even calculate what I’ll do, just notice what is now attacked.

Speaking of that…here’s the position from the top again.

Using Trigger #1, I now notice that g7 is now undefended and the bishop newly on d6 is also undefended. The king cannot castle short without losing the knight. I also notice that the king is defending both the d7 and f7 square. Also the rooks on both the a and h file X-ray each other, both of which are undefended.

Then Trigger #2 shows me that the bishop attacks along the b8-g3 diagonal now and the king will likely go to e7 to connect the rooks and get out of the pin. The rook can attack the bishop with Ra5 but I can simply play a4 to defend the bishop. If cxd I have options of either cxd or exd.

After those steps I can now start comparing moves for White. I have Ne5, Ke2, Kd2 or (the move I missed) Ng5. Ng5 makes multiple threats at the same time. It attacks h7, attacks f7 and pressures Black to reply. What I didn’t calculate in the game (how could I? I barely used any time) was Ng5 h6 (f6? Nxe6) Bxd7+ Kxd7 Nxf7 attacking both the rook and the undefended bishop. White ends up a pawn and has a better endgame. Other lines are Ng5 Ke7 Bxd7 Kxd7 Nxf7; Ng5 Rf8 Rxh7, and so on.

Triggered

The blunder check should be the simplest of thought processes. It’s like that joke from The Office… “Whenever I am about do something I think, “Would an idiot do that?” and if they would I do not do that thing!” Somehow I still play like an idiot at times. The only solace I can take is that I’m not alone.

It would be great if I had the discipline and the willpower to always remember to blunder check. I’m not that guy all the time (or even most of the time). No one is. But using the two physical triggers prompts me to notice some narrow and specific things. This makes the task seem easier in my mind. It also gives me greater information that I was getting before about the position. Lastly, it slows me down just enough to allow my full brain to catch up with my chess intuition. I imagine I still need to slow down more, but this is progress.

The key to slowing down for me are the physical triggers connected to single actions. The key may be different for you. But any trigger that allows us Speed Racers to slow down will absolutely help. Then we can notice the small details that easily get missed in a position, leading to mistakes and terrible blunders. Better information and more time has led to better decisions on my part. Now I just need to make sure that I don’t stop doing it.

Thanks as always for reading. I’ll be back soon with a post on training plans. Stay tuned! Until then, good luck with your chess!