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First Time Playing Correspondence
My initial impressions of correspondence chess.
I'm an adult improver in the #chesspunks Twitter community. I'm just getting back into the game after decades away. As part of my #100daysofchess challenge, I decided to compete in the 1st Chesspunks Correspondence Tournament being held by the community on Chess.com. It's the first time I've played correspondence/daily/mail chess. Here are my first impressions.
It's all consuming
When I started back at chess, I had problems with anxiety when playing games. I was constantly worried that I would blunder. I tweeted here about it. The solution that someone suggested that worked for me was realizing that the vast majority of my moves were actually good. The blunders and mistakes that turned the tide against me in games were infrequent and something that I could study afterwards to hopefully avoid in the future. I began to want to play chess instead of just study it. It was nice.
Correspondence chess added a whole different problem. Sure, I still get anxious if I suddenly find myself in a tight situation, but I think that's natural. The problem here is that even after I move, I end up thinking about the game and my strategy and what might happen next. I replay things in my head and I pull up the analysis board to check that I didn't miss something or to see if I can recover if I did. It takes forever to convert a winning position and, even worse, a losing position can be a long slog trying to dig yourself out of a hole or just slowly (or quickly) fall into it. Don't get me wrong, it's enjoyable and I'm learning to ignore the games when I'm not actively analyzing them, but I don't think this is going to become my new favourite time control. It's even kept me from studying, but now that the tournament is half over and I'm more comfortable with the format, I think I'll have time to look at other things.
It's teaching me how to analyze
As I said, I'm returning to chess after decades away and I've only really started to play games recently. Everyone tells you that you should analyze your games, but I knew that I didn't understand how to do that, either while playing or afterwards. One move changed all that.
Before that move, my approach was to look at the position, try a few lines, and then let it sink in for a while. If you have at least 24 hours to make your move, why not take advantage of it? I'd go back later and go through the position again before moving. Of course, I ended up forgetting lines that I'd seen initially. I would only realize afterwards that I'd made a move that I'd previously considered and rejected and that I was about to see the reasons for that rejection put into action.
The move in question was a knight move to a square that I was completely not covering. When I took a close look at the position, I realized that the knight had three squares it could jump to and all of them were forks. Well, that got my attention. I started to really focus on the coordination of my pieces and, given the chance, on counter attacking. The result was my best game ever. Aided by an uncharacteristic blunder from my opponent, I managed to keep coordination for another 39 moves and win. I'm not going to post the game here, but I will post a gif of it on my Twitter feed (MatthewKCanada). I want to thank my opponent for a wonderful and very useful game.
Every move is a chance to look at the position again
I'm guilty of this when I do puzzles. I look at the puzzle and figure out what I think is the correct sequence. I then follow that sequence. Many times that doesn't work out well, which is probably why my puzzle rating has stayed level for a while. What I should be doing and what I've been forced to do during this tournament is to look at every step of the sequence like it's a new position. What has changed? What new tactics have become available? I've often seen something that looks possible but turns out not to be. A move later, it is possible, but I've already dismissed it, so I don't see it. That's been true in both games and puzzles.
The time you have in correspondence means that you do have the chance to find new things with each move. That doesn't mean you have to. I missed a few opportunities for faster checkmates in the game I mention above, but that's because I was confident that the analysis I had done would guarantee me victory, even if it wasn't the fastest way to get there.
If you sign up, you should show up
I'm sure I wasn't the only person playing correspondence for the first time. Still, out of a group of 6 players, 2 lost all their games. The tournament is 1-day per move with no vacation allowed, so they had 24 hours to make a move. One player had obviously forgotten that they'd signed up because they just completely timed out with everyone without making a move (I think). The other player played a few moves, but not enough for the games to count, and then withdrew. I was unlucky in that two of the three people who did this in the tournament were in my group out of 9 groups. Still, if you sign up, you should show up.
Perhaps a longer time control?
I'm not sure I like the 1-day per move. At times, it led me to not making moves. The problem wasn't that my opponent would take too much time, but that they would take too little. If I made a move at a time that I wasn't available the next day, because of commitments like work, I had to be sure that I wanted to make another move the same day. The result was that I often waited until the evening to make a move. Doing 2-days per move, or the traditional 3, would address this problem and might even have allowed the player who withdrew to actually play. Yes, there's a risk that a game could take forever, but very few of the moves in this tournament came even close to the time limit. It's counterintuitive, but I think it may actually speed things up.
