"Lost on time"



Ok, so the cover looks like it was designed
by a simpleton, but don't let that put you off.
This book is superb!


They are the words chess players hate seeing at the end of a scoresheet. Yes, today’s post is all about time forfeits. It’s also a first opportunity for me to offer readers a bit of a book review for a title I purchased recently called “The Joys of Chess” by Christian Hesse. I purchased it last month and it was the first chess book I had bought in quite some time. My attraction to it probably reflects my changing needs as a chess player, or, to be more precise, a chess publisher. That’s because this book is not an opening treatise or a self-help manual. It is pure entertainment and there is a bucket load of material here for a chess blogger.

To be blunt, I can’t recommend this book heartily enough. Rarely has the title of a book so aptly reflected its content. This work is a gem that has been some years in the making. Hesse has been gathering material throughout his 30-year career as a chess player (he is a Professor of Mathematics by trade). The format of the book makes it very easy to dip in and out of and so you don’t need to spend hours at a time pouring over it with a board. In my household we call this type of publication a “good toilet book” because you can easily consume a chapter during the course of a call of nature! The chapters are mostly fairly short and there are enough diagrams in it to allow you to follow the course of any play without having to use a computer or a board. The subjects are many (there are over 50 chapters in here) and varied cover such diverse topics as “Chess and Psychology”, “Quantum Logic in Chess”, “Retreats of Genius”, “Brilliant Bad Moves” and “Provocation”. I already know that I’m going to be sharing and expanding on some of the contents of this book here on the blog for a long time to come. Fans of Tim Krabbe’s “Chess Curiosities” will love it.

Amongst the chapters is a section called “Time and Time Forfeits” and it is from here that I would like reach for some entertaining examples for today’s post. I’ve written about time management and time trouble on these pages before and the drama of "zeitnot" can be most compelling for spectators watching a game. For the participants however it is exceedingly stressful and yet, some players across every level of competitive chess get into habitual time trouble.

On occasions the likely outcome of a game can be completely turned on it’s head due to one player blundering in time trouble or even running out of time. I’ve only forfeited on time in competitive play once or twice and I can well remember the anguish of feeling like I had wasted my efforts on a game that I had “thrown away”. Let’s face it, most time forfeits are conceded when the game situation is still unclear and often complicated. Losing in such a way with the potential of the game unfulfilled can leave a deep psychological wound.

For example, Hesse mentions Nigel Short’s traumatic loss in the first game of his World Championship match with Garry Kasparov in London in 1993. I had not long started playing chess at the time of this match and remember it vividly. Short had a winning position at the board but over stepped the time limit and forfeited the game. He never really recovered from that loss and went on to lose the match by some margin. As a small diversion however I'd like to recommend the following You Tube clip to readers which is very funny indeed and cleverly made...

Right, back to the task at hand. Hesse references two further examples of time forfeiture that I was not aware of.


Position after 35.Bc5.
Spassky vs. Hort, Game 15
Candidates quarterfinal, Reykjavik, 1977


The position on the left was reached in the penultimate game of a Candidates quarterfinal match. With the match score level the Czech superstar Vlastimil Hort had succeeded in giving himself a wonderful chance of qualification after gaining a winning advantage with Black in this position. An eyewitness to the encounter, Australian Grandmaster Ian Rogers, picks up the story.

“Hort had 4 minutes left in which to reach move 40, and his hand was over the queen about to play the winning move 35…Qg4. Just one of several variations is 36.Rf2 (36.g3 Qh3 is just as bad) Rd1+ 37.Rf1 Rxc1 38.Rxc1 Qd1+ 39.Kf2 Bc5 and White must resign. But Hort’s brain refused to let his hand play the move and the numerous spectators witnessed the horrific drama as Hort’s clock ticked down to zero and he lost on time.”

This is a bizarre case that seems to be analogous to a golfer getting the yips and being unable to execute his putting stroke. Hort was later moved to say in an interview “It was the blackest day of my life”. Truly it scarred him deeply for he was unable to win the last game of the match with the White pieces and lost the match never again to qualify for the Candidates cycle.

Hesse then recounts another extraordinary rabbit-in-the-headlights case of time forfeiture.


Position after 39.Kh3
Larsen vs Gheorghiu, Olympiad
Siegen, 1970


This case (on the right) occurred in another high profile and high stakes environment, the Olympiad, but this time there was some history between the two players that seems to have effected the Romanian’s psyche. He had a terrible personal score against Larsen and admitted that he found playing the irrepressible Dane to be extremely wearing. Never-the-less, in the position above he had managed to secure a winning advantage and needed now only to play 39…Nf3 (threatening 40…Ng5 mate) and Black will be able to convert his material advantage after, for example, 40.Kg2 Ng5+ 41.Kf1 Qxc4+ 42.Qe2 Qxd5. Instead of doing this however, the history books recorded another point in Larsen’s favour. In their book about the Siegen Olympiad, David Levy and Raymond Keene described what happened.

“Eye-witnesses of this remarkable encounter report that Gheorghiu stretched out his arm to play the decisive move 39…Nf3, but just at that moment the said arm was seized by a convulsive shake to such an extent that the Romanian grandmaster was not able to move the piece to the target square. As he tried to summon up the willpower to overcome this unfortunate case of paralysis he over-stepped the time-limit.”

The Larsen hoodoo had triumphed once again.

At least in both of these two cases the victims were aware of their imminent plight despite their physical incapability to doing anything to mitigate against it. In this last case from my own files the victim remained blissfully unaware of what lay in store for him.


Position after 61...Kc5


This is the final position from my third round encounter at the recent British Championships. It had been a tough battle and I had had my opponent on the ropes for much of the game. Having missed some chances to convert my pressure into a win, White now had the better of an endgame that was however, most likely, still drawn. Both of us were down to our last 2 minutes to complete the game and I was expecting my opponent to offer me a draw or try and play for a win. As I sat and waited, along with a gathering crowd, it became apparent to me that my adversary was not aware of the time crisis he was facing. He sat looking at the board as his clock ticked. He didn’t look up, he just thought... and thought... and ran out of time!

When I informed my hapless foe that he had forfeited the game he stared at me with glassy, vacant eyes and then, as realisation dawned on him, he shook his head miserably and said "I didn't realise. The game is drawn. It's a draw." But unfortunately it wasn't, he had lost!

I would only like to add by way of a salutory note that my opponent had arrived 20 minutes late for the start of the game. I leave it to readers to draw the moral from this tale of woe. 

Use the fullness of time

I'm guessing that the clocks at the British Chess
Championships might be slghtly more up to date than these

My British Chess Championships starts today! I'm very excited about it and have been looking forward to it very much. As I prepared for it last week I found this article by Dan Heisman on the Chess Café website to be particularly thought provoking. He talks about what your goals should be for any given game that you play. Obviously, the primary goal is to win the game but he then gives this interesting secondary one that I hadn’t really considered before.

“Your second most important goal in a chess game is to use almost all the time on your clock.”

He reinforces this point by saying that if you aren’t utilising the time you’ve been given to its maximum potential then you are giving your opponent an unnecessary advantage. He makes a good analogy with taking an exam. Most students wouldn’t dream of not using all the time allocated in a test to try and gain the best possible mark that they can. In the same way, Heisman argues that chess players should use as much of their time as they can to give themselves the best chance of getting the right result.

I won’t steal his thunder by repeating all of the details in the article (you can go read it yourself) but he suggests 6 tools that a chess player can make use of to make the most of the time they have for a game. These are:

1. Never start a game without the intention of using almost all your time.
2. Calculate the average time per move before the game starts.
3. When recording each move, also record how many minutes are remaining on your clock.
4. Botvinnik’s Rule – “use 20% of your time for the first 15 moves.”
5. Look at your clock periodically when your opponent is thinking and ask “Am I playing too fast or too slow?” and adjust the upcoming moves accordingly.
6. If you are a player who plays too fast, then your two primary guidelines should be:

• When you see a good move, don’t play it – look for a better one.
• Before you move, make sure your opponent does not have a check, capture, or threat in reply that you can’t safely meet.

The reason I found this thought provoking is because at the Championships I’ll have much longer time limits available than I’m used to and I need to make sure that I’m making good use of them. In league chess I’m used to playing 36 moves in 75 minutes and then the rest of the game in a further 15 minutes. That’s a maximum game length of 3 hours. In the under 160 Championship the game time is up to 4 hours and in the Open that I’m playing in the afternoons the game time is up to 7 hours!!

Generally, I’d say that I manage my clock pretty well in league games. I normally use up a high percentage of my time but I don’t get into time trouble all that often. In the past when I’ve played longer time limits (in county and weekend competitions) my performance level has gone up because I’ve had more time available and used it effectively. I need to make sure that I do that in the coming week as well. I’ll need every advantage I can get and I certainly don’t want to be giving my opponents an advantage by not putting my time to good use! I’m planning to use Heisman’s tools and some of the other advice in his article to make sure that I do use my time well and I’d heartily recommend his guidelines to other players who find themselves playing too quickly or getting into time trouble regularly. His article links to a bunch of other essays that discuss time management in chess and they are well worth consideration.