Pacing Three Minutes
Three minutes sounds generous until you start. Then the clock develops opinions, the puzzles get harder, and somewhere around the ninety-second mark most players make the same mistake: they speed up because they are behind, and go out on a puzzle they could have solved.
A sprint is a budget problem. You have roughly one hundred and eighty seconds and a strike limit. The optimum is not maximum speed; it is maximum solved puzzles before the strikes run out. Those are different targets and they want different behaviour.
Spend unevenly
Early puzzles are cheap. They are also where confidence is built, and where careless strikes are most expensive, because a strike spent on an easy puzzle buys you nothing. Take the extra half second. Confirm the pattern. Move.
Mid-run, the puzzles start requiring an actual idea. This is where the budget should go. Eight seconds on a puzzle you genuinely solve is a far better trade than three seconds on a guess, because the guess costs a strike and the strike ends the run.
Late, with strikes remaining and the clock draining, speed becomes correct again. That is the only phase where moving fast on instinct is the right play, and it is the phase most people never reach because they burned their strikes at the start.
The tell
If your runs consistently end on strikes rather than on the clock, you are moving too fast. If they consistently end on the clock with all strikes intact, you are too cautious and leaving solved puzzles on the table. The balance you want is a run that ends on the clock with one strike spent.
Most players discover they have been running the wrong race for months. They were playing to look fast. The scoreboard only counts solved.
One more thing about breathing
This sounds soft, and it is the single most reliable improvement available. Breathe out before you start. The panic response narrows your vision to the piece you are staring at, which is precisely how you miss a knight on the other side of the board.
Three minutes is long enough to think. Behave as though it is.
