Mastering Time in Chess + PGN Feb 14, 2025

If You Give Him 2 Hours and 50 Minutes,
The 2024 US Senior Vice-Champion
Will Show You How To Close
In On 1800 Elo Fast

…By harnessing this overlooked element. Once it clicks, you start leaving everyone in the dust. You’re suddenly 2, 3, even 4 moves ahead in executing your plan. Your pieces reach prime squares while theirs idle. And the tactics bubble up quickly!

The element is time. And you’ll see it in action in Mastering Time in Chess by Grandmaster Jesse Kraai.

Kraai is a 5-time New Mexico State Champion and the 2024 US Senior Vice-Champion. He’s also a co-founder of ChessDojo — a bustling community of improvers.

Coaching sessions, game reviews, and tourneys showed him a pattern.

Once players hit 1250 Elo, they stop hanging material. But they give up an awful lot of time!

They let you play the move you want with a threat.

While White is developing, Black had to move
already-developed pieces out of harm’s way

Now they must defend with a move that doesn’t help their own plan.

Then you play another good move with a threat. Just like that, you gain a numbers advantage. Your king has also castled to safety…

Black’s queen worsens their problems as
‘rook to e1’ comes with tempo

So when the game explodes, only you can come out on top!

With a huge number’s advantage and
the white king in the center, Black’s win
is only a few moves away

Kraai saw this scene replay over and over. So he concluded that:

“The central skill for players to move from the 90th percentile to the 99th (1750) is to learn how to punish your opponents’ consistent loss of time.”

— Grandmaster Jesse Kraai

He first explored the art of gaining tempo and outpacing opponents in It’s About Time: A Beginner’s Guide to Time in Chess. He doubles down on this concept in the next 3 hours, showing you how to…

Seize the Time Advantage and Build
Momentum with Every Move!

The biggest reason time is so tricky for most players? You can’t see it. Pawns, pieces, and squares are literally right there on the board. But “time” measured in tempo? It’s invisible.

That’s why even the introduction of this course can give you a real edge over people who haven’t studied it.

⏳ Sharpen your sense of time with Kraai’s 3 rules for counting tempo. Recognize who controls the pace, and you’re one step closer to the right plan!

⏳ What a time advantage feels like… and how to use it against your opponent’s positional strengths.

⏳ Plus quick guidelines for snowballing a few tempi into a raging initiative!

At this point, you already know more about time than 90% of your peers. But you don’t want to stop at knowing. You want to turn time manipulation into your skill.

That’s why Kraai doesn’t throw you into super-complicated GM games.

Instead, you sharpen your sense of time through 50 lessons closer to your level. All pulled from games between 1250 to 1750-rated players in the ChessDojo database.

The lessons follow a 100-Elo progression. So you build skill minus the steep learning curve.

These games were played at classical time controls. So not only do you see how players waste tempi even when given time to think… you also see how to beat slow play when it matters most!

White’s Nge2 develops a knight but at the
cost of others, so you strike with …d7-d5!

As you absorb the concepts, you realize you can create time by trading it for other elements.

So you sacrifice pieces! Because you understand that chaining threats to freeze opponents outweigh 3 points of material.

Let Black take the bishop, because your
threats along the light squares pay more!

Then you reach the final chapter. Here, you explore advanced techniques for creating a time advantage.

You develop your rook without moving it. Your smart recaptures clear the way for other pieces… while exchanges leave you with more activity, not less!

Black exchanges 2 minor pieces…
and gains a lead in development!

We’re confident that this course can catapult you closer to 1800 Elo than ever.