Correspondence games. Why was I so afraid of them?

Intro

In this incarnation of me as a chess player - in which I rarely play chess :-? - I played exclusively 3+2 Blitz or something similar. For one, I wanted to force myself to move faster, as opposed to the casual OTB games of my childhood where people thought about a move as much as they wanted (and could). This goes against what the best practices for learning chess say, to play at least Rapid, but that's OK, I don't really have the brain to remember all the chess I learn.

Anyway, is Rapid is too slow, then Correspondence scared the shit out of me. I imagined my opponents focused on their board, with their trusted chess books close at hand and thinking every move for hours. Playing the computer would be easier than these guys, right? But with the recent integration of LiChess Ladders into LiChess Tools, I had to play some of these games.

What was I afraid of?

It felt great! My opponents often play correspondence as I do, moving when they have the time to look at the board, thinking for a minute or two and making the move. There is zero time stress and there is no feeling of dopaminic urgency to play. The quality of my opponents, I was surprised to see, was not that different from what I get in blitz. Slower controls, same blunders.

I found myself thinking about the position in my spare time, something that I never did before. If I were to want to improve in chess, this would be a great achievement on its own. When I was a kid I was playing a game called VGA Planets. It's a multiplayer space colonization game, where the individual players would make decisions all day long and command their ships and colonies to implement. Every day the commands would be executed at the same time. I get now the same kind of buzz of thinking about subtleties or going back on my thoughts and refining them as then.

There is also the chance to chat with people. It happens rarely, but there is that feeling of an actual social interaction with another person with similar interests when it does.

Can I do that?

One of the things that feel weird when playing Correspondence is that using the Analysis Board is permitted during game play. You cannot use the computer evaluation, but you can use the Explorer, which still feels wrong to me. Based on the moves my opponents make, a lot of them don't use it either.

But with the board comes a great feature that is specific to Correspondence games: lines you can prepare and save to be moved. I found using this to be highly rewarding. Let's say you have mate in 3 and you actually see it. You can save the line(s) and when the opponent moves, the system plays the moves you saved up to the mate. You don't have to be there.

Guessing what the opponent would likely do is again a great achievement for a chess learner! It's such a fun experience to see that you successfully predicted your opponent's moves that I was thinking of some way to score this. Imagine a game style where you are rewarded for the length of the correctly predicted line. This would encourage chess thinking on multiple moves as well as the imagination to play novelties that the opponents would not guess. And guessing wrong is still rewarding, as you get feedback on your own thinking process and can work on improving it.

Taking the rose tint off

Up to now I talked about the average experience. Because I am pretty impatient, I started 13 correspondence games at once, so I can talk in terms of averages even if I just started. The outliers are also relevant.

There are people that really do take one day to make a move. That means games with these people take more than a month to finish. I don't blame them, after all, that's what it says when you start the game, but now I have to take into consideration what happens when I explore my repertoire while I have ongoing games with the same opening or if I can even request a computer analysis for a game that contains the same position I have in a running correspondence game.

Then there are the people who just forget to move, resign in a few moves because they don't have as much time as they hoped or didn't get an opening they wanted or they simply don't care about other people's time enough to resign, so they just don't move until the time runs out.

And the strange thing is that the time doesn't seem to run out right. For example I was waiting for this guy to move for three days. Annoyed, I've decided to open the game to see if maybe they sent a message or something. At the moment I opened the game, I was notified I won. Why would the system wait for me to join the game to notice it was a time forfeit?

Also, right now I am playing a one day correspondence game where the opponent has not moved in 46 hours. Yet it's not a time forfeit.
Correction: the time displayed is the total time of the game, not the last time the opponent moved.

Most of these people never send a message when they do these things. Not a "sorry, I don't have the time to play" not a "I hate this opening" not even a "GG" or "GTG" button press when they resign.

Conclusion

Correspondence chess games actually feel more like OTB chess, while automatically promoting some behaviors that are very beneficial for learning the game. There are some people who just mess up the experience by refusing to respect the game and yourself enough to behave politely, but they are not that many.

Mainly, you have to contend with a lot of "zombie" games in your lobby list, where you don't know if the opponent will ever make a move or if they are just taking their sweet time.

Overall, I encourage you to try. Maybe it's not for you, but if it is, you might find a new perspective on playing chess.