I’m trying something a little different this week: an interview with GM Eugene Perelshteyn. Eugene is my co-author on our book Evaluate Like A Grandmaster, a former US Champion, and coach for players from club level to 2700+. He recently made his return to over-the-board chess after an absence of 5+ years. To say it went well would be an understatement: he won the New England Open and Massachusetts Open back-to-back with clear first in both events.
I know many readers are interested in improving their OTB performance – whether returning from a long break, playing their first tournament, or just looking for that extra edge – so I thought it would be interesting to ask Eugene how he prepared for these events.
You can read the interview below, edited for brevity and clarity, or listen to the full conversation at the top of the post.
Nate: What is your baseline when you're not preparing for a tournament? Because obviously you are a coach, you are a chess professional, so it's not like you're not looking at chess.
Eugene: Right. Although my baseline as a coach is I'm looking at my students' games most of the time, which is usually significantly lower level chess. So any range between 1600 to like 22-2300 on a typical weekly basis, that's the range of my students. And of course, my students have a wide repertoire of openings. So I usually try to help them with their own openings. As a result, my openings kind of stagnate, and I don't review my own stuff as much as maybe I should.
But I've been working on Chessable for the past few years. So that definitely helped because the openings that I recommend on Chessable, I played in this tournament, such as the Hyper Accelerated Dragon, which I've been playing all my life. But I have been adding more and more twists and fresh ideas to try to avoid the Maroczy Bind, various move order stuff, which is actually new to me as of the last few years. So I feel like this is a good opportunity, so to say, practice what you preach, right, to actually play these games in OTB serious tournaments.
Nate: Okay, you decide to play in this tournament, right? What's your first step? And it sounds like a lot of it is refining your opening repertoire from sort of knowing a little bit about a lot, having quite a broad knowledge of what you're working with on your students and committing to a specific narrow repertoire for the event.
Eugene: Exactly. So I kind of take this broad spectrum of all my various opening ideas, work with students, work with some 2700 plus players. And I sort of ask myself what is my typical opposition like? You know, how can I maximize my chances to both get complex games because I typically play lower-rated players, but at the same time to sort of be within the predictable narrow repertoire that I can prepare in advance.
Nate: How much does knowing that you'll be the higher rated player affect your approach both with the openings and sort of going in how you play during the game, how you think about navigating the game? Is it a lot different than if you were playing other grandmasters who are at or even higher rated than you?
Eugene: Yes. I would say my mindset is generally different from let's say a GM norm, an invitational event, where I already know I'm going to play a lot of GMs and strong IMs versus an open tournament. I take way more risk as we will talk about one of my games in round five in open tournaments against low rated players, just because of the huge rating difference that's really the only driving reason. If my opponent was 2500 plus, I can't imagine taking that much risk. But I sort of feel like the tournament system in the US where you get a lot of different rating gaps and you have to play a lot of games to play for the win. That sort of makes me choose rather risky openings. So I would choose something like Dzindzi Indian or King’s Indian as opposed to Nimzo and Bogo against a low rated player, just because I feel like these are more complex openings, but also more risky openings, because in these openings, Black surrenders the center rather quickly.
Nate: You mentioned refining, narrowing your opening repertoire. I'm curious what that looks like in terms of do you already have those files built out and you're going back and reviewing them? Or like, are you creating new files? Or are you entering things into Chessable and drilling repetition? Like, when you're really building and refining that repertoire, what are you doing to make sure that's all prepared for the tournament?
Eugene: I wish I had an easy answer to that. But I think it's like all of the above. So I've been definitely toying with Chessable. But I feel like for me, because I learned chess at a younger age and I use the chess board a lot. It's one thing to have everything on the screen and all my files sort of like with notes. But when I start reviewing them on the actual chess board, it doesn't register as easily for me. I don't know about you or your audience. But like when I look at the chess board, my spidey sense is different than when I look at the screen. And I've read Anand had the same issue, like when his seconds were feeding him all these complex analysis and some Semi-Slav lines, he was doing OK. But the moment he starts reviewing this on the board, he's like, oh, this is too dangerous. That is too dangerous. Like I don't want to enter any of these lines unless I understand them. So I think I am also in that category that unless I look at the chess board, it's not internalized.
Nate: There may even be some sort of brain chemistry reason when you touch the pieces physically with your hand, it's perhaps a bit easier to remember.
Eugene: And also for me, it's like certain moves, just like, I guess Magnus said that. His intuition tells him to play certain moves. And I'm the same way, like when I see position on the board, I sort of immediately gravitate towards certain moves and ideas. And if these moves and ideas are approved by the engine, then it's easier for me to internalize it. And if the engine suggests a move that's not in that vicinity, then I'm completely lost. And so if I don't internalize that, I might have that move written in my notes. But when I get that position on the board, I may not get that. I may not even remember that move.
Nate: OK, so far we talked quite a lot about openings. Is openings then a majority of what you feel like you need to get ready for the tournament? Or are you also doing tactics, calculation, training games, other things?
Eugene: I would say openings are by far the biggest sort of driving force. And the openings sort of push everything else. So because I do prefer practice games to practice these openings, there's a lot of calculation already built in and decision making process. I didn't do any specific exercises like one of those Aagaard tactical puzzle books for this specific tournament. Because sometimes I feel like they're too difficult, even for me. And I think what matters most is just like general quick tactics, like, for example, Puzzle Rush, I sometimes do. But most importantly is am I seeing on move one for my opponent or candidate moves? And sometimes I'm not even seeing a simple candidate move. So to me, that's like a red flag. Like, OK, forget about the difficult calculation exercises. Let me try to just visualize the entire board, make sure I see all the moves clearly. And even at the grandmaster level, sometimes you miss. In this tournament, I definitely missed at least one or two instances on move one, a candidate move from my opponent.
Nate: Well, that's reassuring to hear that you sometimes feel that the puzzles are too difficult. So I definitely had that feeling as well. And then I think another part of going into a tournament and having success is confidence, right? And so if you're only doing really difficult puzzles and you're not able to get most of them, that can kind of wear away at your confidence.
Eugene: Yeah, I definitely prefer to have more confidence, rather than less confidence going into a tournament. But solving very difficult puzzles, or if you play like top level Stockfish games and lose every game, that's not also going to be useful. So I would prefer to do simple simpler puzzles, pre-computer age puzzles. Usually, they're a little easier. And there are many books that do that. One of my favorites, I would say, is Test Your Tactical Ability by Neishtadt. So that has a very good human element and every puzzle is human, not just picked by an engine like in these online Chess.com Tactics Trainer or Lichess. Because I find the Lichess and Chess.com puzzles a little bit also not human.
But to add to that, I still like to solve puzzles on the chessboard. So I would take either a slightly older book, or like one of older Aagaard’s books that is not as difficult as the more modern engine-generated books. And then I still prefer human games. So I have New in Chess magazine and they have a lot of annotated games and puzzles. So I like to do that. Basically, any human game that resembles a real life scenario, especially classical, I like to solve over the chessboard.
Nate: So you mentioned you had one moment where you missed a candidate on move one and you told me earlier that you had one blunder in this tournament that could have been exploited, but I guess your opponent missed the best line. So is that where you missed the candidate move?
Eugene: Yeah, I felt like I took a lot of risk out of the opening. So that was round five as black against the 2200 plus opponent. It was a Hyper-Accelerated Dragon where white played this Knight c3 plan. And after I played d5, he pushed e5 and d4. So we got a slightly unusual structure for the Hyper-Accelerated Dragon, but I was familiar with that. But I just wanted to avoid simple chess. And I even castled queenside, which never happens. Definitely took a lot of risk, but I got to give credit to my opponent. He found the most creative way to put pressure on me. But later on, I sort of had two candidate moves. And I can remember it very clearly. I couldn't make up my mind which one is better. They both look good, but one is a little bit more of a developing move. And that's the one that my intuition was gravitating toward. That one was the big failure because I chose that one and I completely missed the candidate move.
Here Eugene was deciding between e6 or Kb8…
Nate: Do you do anything to kind of re-center yourself after in a situation like that?
Eugene: My first impulse was to resign right away because I just couldn't see any defense. And then I'm like, why did I play this? You know, it kind of starts to think backwards. I avoided this line if I played a different move and I'm fine. So you have to recover. So for me, it took probably five minutes to kind of, OK, I'm probably losing. But I'm just going to find the best moves to try to put up a fight.
Position after 1… e6 2. b6 axb6 3. Bb5 Qa5 4. Qxa5 bxa5 5. Ba5. The rook on d8 is trapped.
Nate: So we've talked a lot about the chess side, but speaking more about the mental or psychological side. Do you do anything to either before or during the tournament to get yourself into the right mindset to play?
Eugene: Generally speaking, because I've been playing chess for 20 plus, I mean, more than 20 plus years, maybe 30 years, I have sort of narrowed down to what works for me. And for me, it's the tournament hall itself, as long as there is AC and as long as it's a relatively calm, quiet place, that is my meditative space. So the tournament because it's a classical game, I have a lot of time to walk around or to focus on the moves. There are other games. So that sort of space is where I find less distractions. Whereas in the modern digital world, we constantly check the news or having the phone or going to social media. They're actually way more distractions for me when I'm preparing for the tournament. So that's basically in a short answer. The game itself is a meditative space for me. And when I start thinking, the time flows at a completely different pace.
Nate:You mentioned you had a sort of long think, wrong think type experience. And I think this is very common for a lot of people when they're going back to a classical tournament after not having played in a while. Managing the clock seems to be one of the most challenging things.
Eugene: You know, yeah, to me, it was a very obvious problem because like as the game begins and I'm in the opening and my head is still fresh, like the first half an hour to an hour, I think I am more or less alert than I'm seeing all the lines. I'm calculating well. But then after like an hour in or maybe one and a half hours in and of me calculating and then there is some complex position, I start going deep. I realize in some complicated position, 15 moves deep. Or rather thinking for 15 minutes, doesn't matter if it's five moves deep or 10 moves deep. After I get out from that thought process and I looked at all the candidates, I am not fresher nor do I know more about the position that I began with. And so I'm like, why did I just like spend 15 minutes trying to go into this position without...And I'm just like, it's almost like everything is like hodgepodge in my head, all the lines are intermixed and I don't have a clear picture.
Nate: So when you recognize that, what's the move, meaning not what's the move on the board, what's the mental move?
Eugene: Yeah, usually like once I recognize that, I usually try to reset as quickly as I can. Just try to look at a position with fresh eyes and almost logically talk through the thought process. Like, what are the most logical moves in the position? Forget about all this deep calculation and use my intuition as much as I can, because clearly that extra 15 minutes of deep calculation did not help me. So now I have to sort of go back to square one and use my grandmaster intuition and just basic common sense to navigate the position… And what I typically do when I get kind of lost in the labyrinth of different variations, I use this concept of comparison. So I get a sense which moves give my opponent less counterplay and which positions sort of narrow down my opponent's counterplay. And I gravitate toward those versus the ones that give my opponent more counterplay.
Nate: Did you have a specific goal as far as results going into either tournament or was it more just kind of do my best and see what happens?
Eugene: Yeah, after such a long break, I did not have any specific goals. I did not think about first or second place. I mean, it would be nice to come in first or second, but I was more thinking about, I just want to play a good chess, ideally not lose too much rating points, because I realized that when you were the highest rated player in this field, I have to score five out of six just to not lose my rating. Anything below that, I lose rating. And so my goal wasn't to score five out of six or five and a half out of six or whatever. My goal was just to try to play my best chess and not to lose too many rating points.
Nate: Do you think there's, there's any particular quality or practice or strategy that separates the older players who are able to like continue to stay at the same level or improve versus the guys who are losing quite a lot of rating points?
Eugene: Well, I mean, specifically for me, I definitely experienced many moments throughout this tournament where I felt like I have to go into the bag of Grandmaster tricks that I've experienced over the years to try to create problems for my opponent because they're just too solid or sometimes too good and they don't blunder. And so what sometimes happened is I, it's easier for me to predict my opponent's thought process because of experience. And I try to play moves that maybe objectively that doesn't really change the eval, but it will likely make my opponent play a mistake. And so I sort of go into that bag of tricks from time to time to objectively, I'm not better. Practically, I have to keep creating problems. And both on the clock, like if most of my opponents were significantly behind on the clock in this tournament. And when you aren't behind on the clock, that pressure starts to add up. And eventually, even if you keep playing good moves, you may make a mistake. And then I also kind of make sometimes moves that are maybe objectively are not going to change the eval, but the practical problems they pose are more likely to cause mistakes.
Nate: So you said you didn't have a specific outcome goal. How do you feel about playing these tournaments looking back now? Like, do you think your experience and sort of memory of them is a lot different as having won or not? And the reason I asked is just I also have not played over the board tournament in a long time, too long, really, I want to get back out there. And for me, what I worry about is not so much that I would lose or have a bad result, because I think more likely than not, I'll be able to have a decent result. But even if I didn't, I could handle it. Not a problem. But the thing that's more of a challenge for me is just like the time investment of both preparation, getting ready to play. And then also taking a weekend or a week where I could be working, I could be hanging out with my family. And just, am I going to feel like it was I sort of got enough out of that experience that I feel good about that time investment?
Eugene: Yeah.I mean, those are the thought processes that also go in my head before a tournament. I'm like, I'm likely going to be the highest rated seed. There's going to be more pressure on me to win. Is this worthwhile? You know, what if I have a bad tournament? What if I win the tournament? Well, that's expected. It changes, right? So basically for me, the criteria is, am I going to be enjoying the games as they happen? And sometimes I'm not enjoying the games. And that's sort of based on how things are going. But I think what really, like after the tournament, because like during the tournament, you're really tired, so sometimes you start doubting if that was the right decision. But once for me, the tournaments were over and I managed to separate myself enough from the tournament. I look back on it and I feel like there's so many instructive moments in every single game, even against lower rated players that I may have not picked up that way, that to me, it's almost like for weeks, if not months, I start to digest that. And then it gives me food for thought and also gives me like material for my students, right? So like, it's one thing to coach and say, oh, you're supposed to play this move. It's another thing to show the game and say, well, look at that. Look at my thought process. Look at my thought process breaking down. Look at the decision making. Like there's a lot of things that I get, they relate to and I relate to them when you're more active. So I feel like it's almost like a necessary step to really understand your students to play yourself.
Nate: Is there anything we didn't cover any other tips you want to share for OTB tournaments before we sign off?
Eugene: Not too many. I guess a lot of people feel really nervous if they haven't played OTB before and they start like, how do I plan my schedule? How do I go into optimal form for the tournament? How do I set up my preparation? I think all of that is normal and I go through those stages too. But honestly, no matter what you do, you will not be prepared for OTB tournament. The only way to be prepared for OTB tournament is to play OTB chess. So I think probably look at it. Okay, this is just my practice tournament. I'm going to take away lessons from this tournament and I'm going to play again in like a month or two and that's going to be my next, almost think of this as a practice event. Then there's no pressure. And that's how I look at it like, okay, what if I play again in St. Louis? If I play in some big open Swiss? This is a perfect practice tournament because it's not as intense. It's only one weekend. It's not nine rounds, only six rounds. And so those criteria make me less stressed out going into the tournament.
Nate: I think there are people who want to somehow lock themselves in a cave, learn everything about chess, and just emerge at the tournament and triumph, right? But it's like the tournament itself, it is the practice. It's the work. It's like the best kind of practice.
Eugene: Exactly. And as long as people approach the tournament as part of their chess study routine, because you think, oh, I study chess, I play chess. They’re two separate things, right? No, no, no, the tournament is part of that routine. And that tournament gives you the best opportunity to apply what you've learned and learn from the mistakes.
How To Prepare For An OTB Tournament