Most chess games played on the internet are blitz games with fast time controls, although there are also players preferring slow time control games. The other extreme are correspondence chess games that allow players several days or even weeks to make one move. Before internet connections became common, postcards were used to communicate between opponents. Nowadays, this is mostly done by email or by playing on one of the correspondence, or turn-based chess servers (reviews of several correspondence chess servers).

I started playing correspondence chess on ChessWorld simply because it was hard for me to find time for a slow "live" game. After playing correspondence chess games for a couple of weeks, however, I found that being able to spend as little/much time on chess as my schedule permits and still be able to actually analyze a position is not the only advantage. Being a chess novice often means loosing pieces by simply leaving them en prise. Having as much time as I want to make a move (a time limit of one week or more allows more analysis then I would want, but I will come back to this later) reduces the number of outright blunders to a minimum. I have to admit, however, that I sometimes drop pieces even in correspondence chess games. The lack of time pressure makes this even more embarrassing.

In fact, I believe that some of my victories in correspondence chess games are less due to me being a better player than my opponents (who frequently have the experience of several hundred completed games) but more due to the fact that I play a lower number of simultaneous games and put more time into analyzing the positions then they do. In fact, as another chess blogger wrote recently, this intense analyzing can become quite addictive! However, I've won also a few games so far where my opponents simply did not recognize a simple mate-in-one patters so studying tactics pays also off in correspondence games.

Granted, I did not suddenly become a chess master by playing slower. But at least the slow pace of correspondence chess allows me to form plans that go beyond the next move and to try to apply some of the strategic principles I learned from playing through annotated master games. In over-the-board games I am still too busy to just prevent my pieces from disappearing to actually care about strategy. But as recently noted in Edwin's review of the "Basics of winning chess middlegames" DVD, I also believe that forming plans while playing chess will lead to chess improvement, even if the plans initially lead to nowhere more often than not.

I believe that I learned the most from the games I lost. Therefore, I am happy that after finishing my tenth game on ChessWorld a few days ago, I am now qualified to play in tournaments that are categorized according to the players ratings. My current rating barely qualifies me for the second lowest bracket, so I expect a superior opposition and hope to quickly improve my chess play (ironically by loosing games, but of course I will do my best!).

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