Chess Without a Clock
There are two games I play and they are not the same game, although the pieces are identical and the board is the same size.
Blitz is a game of preferences. Almost every move in a blitz game is a selection from a short, bright list: the capture, the check, the square that looks clever. You do not examine the quiet move, the one that takes four moves to say anything and gains nothing at the moment. The clock makes that examination impossible, and so blitz chess is a long series of assertions about where the pieces are going.
Slow play is the opposite. With an hour and a half and a flag that will not fall for another half hour, a position can simply be sat with. I have won games by doing nothing for eleven moves, not by passing the time but by waiting for the position to tell me what it was. Sometimes what it tells you is that you are lost, which takes longer to hear than it does to read.
This is what speed costs. Not accuracy, exactly. It costs the second look. In blitz I am a person who sees what is happening on the board; in slow play I am a person who sees what the board is about to say. Most players have one of these minds and pretend to have the other.
So I keep both, and I keep them for different purposes. Blitz keeps the machinery honest: pattern, calculation, the small alarms that tell you something is wrong before you know what. Slow chess is where the truth of a position comes out, including the truths I would rather not have, and I no longer expect blitz to teach me anything about the middlegame.
I will admit that slow chess has ruined me for tournament chess. My club has one long game a week, on a Tuesday, with the clock set to ninety minutes plus half an hour of increment, and the whole room plays as though it were in a library. We get through maybe two games a night. It is my favourite kind of evening and it is also the reason I finish everything late.