Hi all,

Having learned the rules last February, but then having not played much since, I began January this year determined to play more and increase my strength. I'm currently floating around 16K. My question is quite simple (but the answer might not be!): What is the optimum game time for someone at the beginner/intermediate kyu levels wishing to improve?

I am currently playing either correspondence games or 15 mins with 3x30s byo-yomi. The former seems too slow (I don't have a great deal to think about), and at times the latter seems too fast (when determining life status of groups etc.).

Cheers,
Jim.

Hi Jim,

It really depends on the person.
You're correct: at times, you don't have much to think about.
But for tricky situations, 30 secs seem too fast.
Canadian time control could be nice:
it lets you allocate your time (e.g. 20 minutes/15 moves)
instead of a fixed time per move (e.g. 30 secs/move).
A drawback is you do have to manage your time wisely.

As a very general guideline for someone your level,
2 seconds for every move is too fast;
and 1 minute for every move is too slow;
you have to find out which time settings work for you,
from actual experience.

Perfect - thanks for swift response!

I think it is important to play slower games from time to time (30 or 40 minutes main time), on the days when you have the energy to do a lot of reading. I don't see a point to play slow games when you feel tired, but slow games are the most important to progress. However I would recommend at your level to never go under 10 minutes + 30s byo-yomi or 5/25 canadian or something similar. This way you don't necessarily have time to read the life status of everything but at least you can think about a few options at each move.

_________________
La victoire est un hasard, la défaite une nécessité.

That's very useful - thank you both.

What time limits do you and your opponents find most enjoyable?

As for improvement, at your level time spent in review is probably more important than time spent playing. Taking up to one hour to review a game is not a bad idea.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I may be biased from online play, but to me this doesn't seem fast. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend Haylee's youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTji1k ... 5dB_Vxka9g

She is a (former?) professional who plays against players online and talks through her thought process. Most of her games use time settings like 5 mins + 3x30s, and they don't feel like blitz or reckless play at all. I personally learned a lot in watching how she manages her time. Obviously her reading is very fast, but if you are calm and focus on reading important moves, 30s is usually enough. If you really need more time for a specific complex situation, you can often play a sente move or a ko threat to gain 30 more seconds.

If both players use 30s for each move, and the game lasts 200 moves, that's 100 minutes, more than an hour and a half. Of course you probably don't use 30s for each move, and if you tracked how much time you spend per move (servers like kgs will record it in the sgf for you) it would probably look more like: 2s, 5s, 1s, 10s, 2s, 3s, 16s, 25s, 1s, etc. etc.
One skill that can make time management easier (and improve your play in general) is just to start reading sooner; don't wait for the complex life and death situation to start reading, but try to read ahead and use your time wisely for each move.

To follow up, Fedya recently posted a game for review here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12602

This game was 226 moves, and the time setting was 20 minutes with 60s byo-yomi. He never went into byo-yomi, ending the game with 21s on the clock. I pulled out the number of seconds he used for each of the 113 moves he played:

10 10 6 4 10 4 4 8 23 4 4 6 6 6 37 16 4 3 2 4 4 5 14 3 4 14 3 14 4 9 23 5 7 6 10 10 33 5 4 22 4 8 18 53 12 16 7 4 5 7 45 19 9 20 9 6 9 4 18 7 7 11 6 40 5 5 6 4 6 6 6 8 4 60 4 3 7 52 61 3 3 4 3 7 3 34 8 33 3 3 3 6 6 2 6 7 6 6 5 12 4 4 3 8 13 3 4 7 3 3 3 7 0

Only 10 of the moves took him more than 30 seconds to play. The median move time was 6 seconds. (Sorry Fedya, I am not picking on you. I would use my own game, but unfortunately tygem doesn't record this information. This was the most recent kgs game I could find in the review forum.)

I think players often feel a pressure from byo-yomi that doesn't exist. They see the timer and think "oh know I won't be able to find a move in 30s!" and panic. But if you just played as if the timer wasn't there, you would probably pick a move before 30 seconds anyway.

I think beginners and intermediates have a tendency to play too fast. I'm speaking of myself, of course.
A guide for you may be a club timing scheme: 45 min + 10x 30 sec. That's the schedule we use, but I think is also widely used elsewhere.

The tendency to play too fast led me to the following idea.
I want to introduce a sort of reverse timing: a player is not allowed to play a move within say 30 seconds.
If we had some time experimenting with this, I'll let you know how it went.

Most importantly:
-1- Have fun either way, whatever the schedule
-2- Mutually agree on timing on beforehand (and no clock errors please)

Interesting idea. Especially for the opening.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I am with Bill here. I think it far more important to spend time reviewing the game and the actual time spend on play is not so important. Weaker players have a tendency to play way too slow and the time is mostly wasted. Until you reach SDK, maybe even 5k, don't spend a lot of time on the game. Spend two or three times more on the review than you do on the game.

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I think this is the key for beginners. To improve, you need to play a lot of games, and most people won't play if they aren't having fun. Find a time setting that works for you (and is relatively easy to find opponents), and keep playing!

I will be playing a three hour main time game today .

You're not a beginner.

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

It doesn't matter what you do, you will improve in any way at that level.

If you try different settings, you'll probably notice that at some point your quality of play starts to drop off dramatically as you turn on the time pressure. You may also find that at some point, more time just doesn't result in better plays. It may even get worse due to overthinking, which can cause you to play weird moves rather than normal ones. In my case, it looks like this. Like many things, the knee in curve is the sweet spot

Note that long thinking time means longer game. Can you stay focused for 2 hours? 4 hours?

I play chess to tournament level, so yes I am able to focus for 5+ hours. However, this is my problem: In chess, it is often recommended beginners play longer games, but it seems (anecdotally, at least) that for Go, longer games are the preserve of stronger players, and beginners are recommended to play shorter games (so you can play more). Just an interesting contrast.

Cheers,
Jim.

Hi Jim, this , and that .

I usually recommend that beginners play shorter games for a number of reasons, the primary one being...
- they usually don't know enough to use long thinking times effectively, trying to choose between a bad move and a worse move -- it doesn't matter which one they pick. The sooner they pick one, the sooner they'll learn why it was wrong and not to do it again. Else, too much time will pass, and they'll forget what they played or why, and won't learn.

when I was a beginner, I was paralyzed at being able to play faster games -- I couldn't do it. But now I see the benefits of why I should have tried.

As you get stronger, you need more time to analyze different possible variations. Though it can also be good to play fast games here too, to train your instincts.