marvin wrote:
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You entered byoyomi at move 109, 10 minutes for 25 moves. How much time did you use before byoyomi?
75 min
I don't know how bad was this, but since I play sometimes on IGS, I thought that playing in byoyomi shouldn't be a problem.
But it was, I zoned out a few times thinking about a move, and then I had a few minutes left and almost all of 25 left stones to play. Which made me nervous and harder to concentrate on the move, and not think about the time too much. And playing with the analog clock, it was not obvious precisely how much time I have left. Also, the game lasted for 3h, so it was hard to maintain the concentration through the end.
Where endurance is a question, sports psychologists say, or they used to say, expend 80% effort, not 100%. OC, go is not like running, so you can relax, mentally and physically. Different people have different ways of doing that.
I remember preparing for the Western States Open, in the days before the internet. Some friends helped me train playing with byoyomi. I found it surprisingly nervewracking.
I made a plan to go into byoyomi at move 175, and that worked OK.
I don't know if having a plan of when to enter byoyomi would work for you, but I pass that idea along. Your pace for your first 54 moves was more than 3 times as slow as the byoyomi pace. That's a fairly big difference.
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I guess I am just finding the excuses:P.
But I have problems with time (losing on time or playing bad moves in the last second) also online, and I know I have this problem, but I am unable to really fix it.
Time management aside, I wanted to raise the related question of effective use of time. For amateurs, Rin Kaiho recommended reserving a good bit of time to use on a single, crucial move. I think that with the time limits of this game, reserving 30 minutes would perhaps be reasonable. That would leave you 45 minutes for the rest, before byoyomi. If you went into byoyomi at move 150, that would still be a pace of about 15 minutes for 25 moves, ⅔ as fast as byoyomi. I don't know if that pace would be good for you or not.
I was impressed with Kotov's discipline for calculating variations in chess, which he wrote about in
Think Like a Grandmaster. My impression, from this one game, is that, in the opening, anyway, you read too deeply and not broadly enough. There were good plays that you did not consider or, if you did, you did not spend enough time on. For each play, whether yours or your opponent's, the first thing Kotov does is to identify candidate moves. Sometimes there are several, sometimes only a few. Obviously, how much time you can spend on each branch will differ accordingly. One thing that is peculiar to Kotov is that he recommends reading each branch only once.
His point is that you have to trust your reading, and if so, there is no reason to go back over what you have already read. (Except on the next move. the board has changed, after all.) Nobody else seems to follow that rule, and research does not bear it out. But, IMO, it is a good way to develop discipline in reading. It's now or never.
Also, if you are spending time going back over what you have already read, it's a timesaver.
Anyway, FWIW, I think that you may benefit from reading more broadly and less deeply. You might try restricting the depth of your reading, unless it seems really important to go deeper. And maybe spend more time looking for candidate moves. Knowing which moves and how many you are going to explore can help you ration your time better.
Good luck!