Don't Sacrifice Your Advantage

My chess opponents were doing something I couldn't explain

I.

About a year ago, I started really getting into online chess. But before I go any further, I have to explain what time controls are.

It’s common to play online chess with time-controls; this is so the game takes a predictable amount of time to end and your opponent doesn’t take forever to move. In a time-controlled game, both players start with a certain amount of time on their clock. While it’s your turn, your clock counts down — if it gets to zero, you lose. The chess jargon for this is getting “flagged” (old timey physical chess timers would have a flag go up when the timer ran out). In some formats, you get an increment to your timer whenever you end your turn. For example, when I started playing, my favorite time control was “10+5”: this means both players start with 10 minutes on their clock (which they have to conserve through the whole match), and get 5 free seconds added to their clock each turn.

When I started last year, I hadn’t really played chess in a solid decade. I was very familiar with the rules, but not at all with the board positions, openings, common strategies, and so on. Because of this, I ended up spending an inordinately large amount of time on my moves compared to my opponent. It was a common sight to see me with something like 30 seconds left on my clock, compared to the opponents 5 minutes (and by common, I mean like every game).

Naturally, I end up having to make moves much quicker than I had the luxury of doing before. This is called “time pressure”; I cannot afford to spend more than several seconds on each move. That makes sense.

II.

What doesn’t make sense is when my opponent, who still has eons left on his clock, begins to play just as fast as me!

Playing fast is not good in chess; you make mistakes when you play fast that your opponent can take advantage of. And indeed, many a game did I win because my opponent, who had plenty of time on his clock, blundered due to playing fast. In fact it was often worse than this: they could be winning on the board, and squander their lead by insisting, for whatever reason, to play as though they too had mere seconds left on their clock.

And this kept happening, and I couldn’t figure it out. Why would they give up their advantage like that? It felt like they’d stopped playing to win; it genuinely seemed like they were being chivalrous. Or perhaps they’d just gotten bored.

I considered whether there was anything strategic to what they were doing; were they trying to prevent me from thinking about the board on their time? I don’t think so, or at least this would be poor strategy; there are dozens of possible ways the board could look when they pass the turn to me, meaning I’d still have to think about configuration of the board once it’s my turn to play. On the other hand, they have the exact configuration in front of them that they would be making a move based off of.

In fact, nothing about this should make sense. By playing as fast as me, it is as if my opponent is playing with as much time left on their clock as I have — a decidedly worse position than their current one. They had simply put themselves on my level, rendering their time-advantage useless.

I was pleased with the easy wins, but remained perplexed. Until it started happening to me.

III.

Over the course of months, I became more and more seasoned at the game, and the common positions became more natural to me. The result was that I eventually stopped spending so much time on my moves compared to my opponent. This inevitably led to my first situation where the shoe was on the other foot; the opponent being down to his last several seconds, I had minutes to spare on my clock.

And I repeated exactly the same behavior I was so perplexed by in my opponents! So, I finally understood (or at least I think) what was really going on here.

When a the timers are so extremely asymmetrical (Player 1 having seconds and Player 2 having minutes), that means that P2 has been waiting a long time throughout the match for P1 to make his move. He’s been spending minutes staring at P1’s clock, watching it go from 3 minutes, to 2, to 1, to half a minute, etc. This builds up, in P2’s mind, as an impending victory-by-clock. He’s observed that when it’s P1’s turn, he can’t help but to spend a lot of time on his turn. This “observation”, along with a combination of impatience and lack of game-theoretic discipline, drives the kind of behavior in P2 I described. The anticipation of flagging his opponent has built up so much that he only thinks about winning by sending the turn right back to the opponent so that their timer can run out — neglecting that his strategy has effectively placed himself exactly in P1’s predicament.

IV.

This might seem like a post about chess, but I think something bigger is going on here. I feel sure that there’s some kind of general psychological, game-theoretic, rationalist principle behind this, but I can’t seem to tease it out with just this example. I’d love for people to share where they’ve seen this kind of phenomenon has appeared in non-chess situations, whether there’s a name for it, any literature on it, etc.