How to Prepare for a Tournament in One Week

When I signed up for the Nebraska Hall of Fame Celebration tournament, it seemed like a good idea. I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a while that I want to get more involved in growing the local chess community in Nebraska, and the organizers put a lot of money and effort into this event, so why not support it?

Then I looked at my calendar and realized it’s less than two weeks away.

On top of that, I’m just coming off the first month with a newborn, so my sleep, exercise, and nutrition haven’t exactly been optimal. This is an extreme case, but broadly, I think it’s the situation many adults find themselves in as a tournament approaches: Your preparation isn’t where you want it to be, you don’t have as much time as you’d like, but you still want to do as well as you can. So, what to do?

Let’s draw a distinction between tournament preparation and overall chess improvement. Chess improvement is about increasing your skill. Tournament preparation is about getting ready to use the skill you have. In a perfect world, you’d play tournaments regularly, so you’d be working on chess continuously and there’d be little need to do anything special to get ready for any particular tournament. In reality, most of us go through periods where our other responsibilities don’t allow us to work on chess, and when we come back we have to knock the rust off.

For me, this is all about confidence. And I find that there are two main categories that help me feel confident: openings and tactics. I want to feel confident in the openings I’m playing, and in my ability to see the board and spot basic tactics. So my preparation plan is based around those two goals.

Openings

We know that the opening phase doesn’t usually determine the result of the game, but nonetheless, pre-tournament anxiety often attaches itself to opening preparation, maybe because it seems to be something we can control. Rather than fight against this, I prefer to just prepare my openings. Even if the value is largely psychological, that is real value nonetheless.

The first part of my opening preparation is to decide which openings I’ll use for this tournament. In general, I don’t try to target my opponents with specific preparation for each round. I decide before the tournament which openings I’ll use, I prepare them, and I play them. This allows me to be more relaxed during the tournament.

I’m attracted to the idea of preparing an entirely new opening repertoire for each tournament. This would make me impossible to prepare for, and if I do it for each tournament, I’ll continuously broaden my repertoire and learn more openings I can show my students. But in this case, with just a week of prep time, it just won’t be possible.

As a compromise, I decided to use my Chessable repertoires for White and for Black against 1. e4. Only against 1. d4 will I be preparing something new.

Here are the main components of my opening preparation:

• Do the Blank Slate Drill with each of my main openings.

• 10 minutes of Chessable reviews per day.

• Blitz games and reviewing the openings when I can find a little extra time.

Tactics

As opposed to openings, tactics really will decide most of your games. But it’s usually not the long, flashy sequences that often show up in puzzle books; more often than not, someone loses because they completely miss a simple move. For that reason, I want to make sure that I’m seeing the board well, in a context as similar to a real tournament as I can manage.

Here’s my tactics plan:

• One “hard” puzzle per day, set up on a physical board. I started out with puzzles from Universal Chess Training, by Wojciech Moranda, but it was too hard. I couldn’t get any of the puzzles and it was messing with my confidence. So I switched to Practical Chess Exercises by Ray Cheng, which is probably a little too easy. I might try Perfect Your Chess by Volikitin. In any case, mostly I just want to get used to seeing the board.

• Rapid training games. I reached out to a few friends to play some 10+5 games, just to get the feel for playing some (slightly) slower games. These are really valuable, but unfortunately I won’t have time for many of them.

Finally, one thing that isn’t part of my training plan, but might also help boost my confidence, is a speedrun I’m starting as a compliment to my Black repertoire on Chessable. As part of this I’ll be grinding a new account up from 600, playing the openings in the course, to show how the lines play out against players at a range of levels. So I’ll be spending a fair bit of time beating the crap out of lower rated players. This might be dumb, but honestly, sometimes it feels good just to win some games.

Overall, I think this plan will help me feel confident and perform at a decent level in the tournament. Next time you have a tournament with inadequate time to prepare, consider trying out some of these ideas. Just remember: easy puzzles can build your confidence and play up to your current level, but if you want to fundamentally improve as a chess player, you’ll also have to do some hard work.