Time settings

[Pippen]

I wonder what kind of time settings are best to play with (on the Internet). More longer ones (30min, 30x5) where u have the time to lean back once in a while and think about the whole board and make plans or faster ones (10min, 30/20x5) where u can't think that much, but enough to calculate certain things or real fast ones where u just play out of your feeling with no brute force at all. What do pro's say or what do other teachers recommend?

[p2501]

From teachers I have constantly gotten the advice to play with slightly faster time settings than I am comfortable with.

edit: typo

[Uberdude]

Define "best".

[Phelan]

I wonder what kind of time settings are best to play with (on the Internet). More longer ones (30min, 30x5) where u have the time to lean back once in a while and think about the whole board and make plans or faster ones (10min, 30/20x5) where u can't think that much, but enough to calculate certain things or real fast ones where u just play out of your feeling with no brute force at all. What do pro's say or what do other teachers recommend?

I prefer what you call longer ones. The others seem too fast for comfort. But there is a lot of variance on what teachers recommend, and it also depends on how you play at the moment. Trying new time limits sometimes helps part of your game.

On my specific case, I used to be an ultra slow player, losing on time a lot. I tried to play a lot of fast games(sometimes blitz), and improved my time management a lot. To the point that I now play faster than most people, even on those longer time limits. I usually stop from time to time to consider some moves I think are more important.

[SmoothOper]

I think finding competition for any particular time setting is a primary motivation, the second is that on the internet I find that two players aren't necessarily in the same time zones and have the same amount of free time or stability of connection. So while I would prefer to play longer games the length of the game is limited by the expectation of the game being interrupted.

Take the worst case scenario my opponent disconnects twenty to thirty minutes into the game, the game is wasted. Sure you get a win, but its not very satisfying and vice versa. Or I get interrupted by a phone call. As the game gets longer say an hour but gets interrupted forty minutes into that is much more of a waste, furthermore the longer the game is the more likely there is an interruption.

In person I think taking much longer is more fun.

[DeFlow]

Online I always play 30 min + buo-yuomi games. Most of the time I use these 30 minutes for my first 100 moves (i.e. far into the middle game).

If we take into account that tournament games usually have a time limit of at least one hour per person, and all the go clubs I know of also use longer time limits, it seems that even 30 min + buo-yuomi is quite a fast game.

Opinions differ on what's better. Some people say you train your sense of shape by playing fast games, some people say slow games are better to train your reading. Both statements seem true to me.

I have a question though. Do you think by playing on faster time settings you will also learn to read faster? If this is true, I'd see more benefit in playing faster games. Right now I like to play games where I have time to think, so why would I play ten minute games?