Racing Against Procedure
A Mental Check for Traction
It’s the Canadian Grand Prix in Montréal this weekend. Our apartment is a few kilometers from Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, so we’ve been able to hear the fantastic F1 engines all weekend. For the 362 days when race cars aren’t on the buttery smooth asphalt track, the speed limit is just 40kph – and it’s open to cyclists, who, as much as they hate cars, really enjoy pretending to be one.
Speed is an important thing in nearly every game. Chess as well. And not just in low time limit bullet (< 3 min.) and blitz (< 6 min.) matches, but in unlimited time formats as well. White starts with a “time” advantage, known as tempo, with the first move. Black begins on the back foot.
It’s a bit of a weird concept. How could there be time advantage without clocks?
Tempo is a procedural upper hand. You move first, your opponent responds. You get to lead the dance; they get to follow. Both roles are played differently. With tempo, your goal is to build pressure and complexity. Without tempo, you should seek to maintain structure and reduce the number of potential attack surfaces.
Tempo can be lost in a few ways:
Inefficient moves lead to eventual loss of tempo.
Totally unnecessary moves immediately lose tempo.
Intentional loss of tempo for a positional advantage.
Bad ways to lose tempo in chess include moving the same piece twice in a row, pointlessly chasing pieces, and “forcing” your opponent to make defensive moves that they already planned. Chess is a race, just as much as it is a strategy game. You have a standard clock, but also a clock of initiative – the more tempi you can accumulate, the further ahead you are when you reach the endgame.
In those crucial moments where every move counts it becomes clear who is just too slow. Before the endgame it’s not so obvious. Speed is most easily accounted for with a clock; but a good move made slow is better than a decent move made quickly. Hence the military adage (which was a favorite of mine when watching The Peripheral: “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”.
My favorite mental check for maintaining or gaining tempo in chess is…
Does this move accomplish more than one thing?
The more critical paths that you can advance along on with one move, the faster your development. Unlike some more technical ideas from chess, like castling or the en passant, this trick transfers well. Project management, for example, is an extremely tactical game. You should always take a moment to prioritize tasks that accomplish multiple subprojects simultaneously.
There’s another reason that this trick works unreasonably well in chess. It holds you back from early captures. More pieces means more potential paths that you can make progress along. You can accumulate tempo faster on a complicated board. Hence the chess adage: “To take is a mistake”. Until you commit to a clear avenue of attack, the goal is to make general progress in your setup – and to make that progress at speed.
Chess is a toy game, but… the concepts required to reach an intermediate level, do kind of train you in the dark arts of GANTT, GTD, CPM, PPM, and other weird tactical frameworks for organizing work. Despite the surface-level linearity of their sport, I bet F1 teams have quite a few chess players.
I’ll run a biweekly online study group on some similar ideas starting later this month. If all goes well, we should find some fresh and effective management tools with a focus on protocol literacy. You can express interest here for that and other groups. Mine is the Spannungsfeld one – if you have no idea what that means, you can check out the following for a bit of context: