I Don't Like Chess Tournaments

I advanced my pawn to the sixth rank. I expected him to move his king, and had calculated a sequence that ended with me promoting a pawn and winning his rook. I was a few moves away from winning my last game of the tournament and salvaging a decent result.

Instead, he moved his rook along the rank my pawn had just vacated and put me in check. Hadn’t considered that. My king had to step sideways. Then, he would check me again and force a rook trade. Now his king was close enough to stop both of my pawns, while my king was too far away to stop his lone passer. It was all over, nothing to do.

I made a few more moves, laughed, and extended my hand in resignation. I put a lot of emphasis on losing with grace, especially against kids. I congratulated my opponent on the win and went up to my hotel room.

My plan for the night was to order room service and watch TV. I had gotten sick during the tournament and was looking forward to a night of recovery before flying back home to my two small kids. I picked up the phone and dialed room service and was put on hold. I put the phone on speaker and started tidying up the room.

“I’m really handling this loss well,” I thought.

After a while, I heard a voice on the other end. “Hello?”

“Hi, I’d like to put in a room service order.”

“Hello?”

Apparently the speaker didn’t have a microphone. I rushed over to pick up the receiver, but just as I did, they hung up. For a second, time seemed to slow down. I threw the phone down. Time resumed its normal pace. The dial tone was going, seemingly louder than before. I put it back on the base but the tone kept going. Yep, definitely broken.

Maybe I wasn’t handling this loss as well as I thought.

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One of the best parts about being an adult is you can do the things you like, and stop doing the things you don’t like. In college, I never liked frat parties. I did like going to office hours, but I went to parties much more often because I thought that was the cool thing to do. Now, when I want to learn something, I watch a lecture on YouTube – sometimes even from one of the same professors I could have talked to face to face. Obviously, I wish I had taken better advantage of that opportunity when I had it.

Other things I don’t like: bars and concerts. I really don’t like crowds. For me to put myself in a crowd, there has to be something really important going on. I also hate being sick. I really like my normal day-to-day life – playing with the kids, coaching chess, and writing – and when I get sick I can lose days or weeks of work.

Which brings me back to chess tournaments. A lot of us experience the tug and pull of going to tournaments or staying home. It takes a huge psychological effort to psych ourselves up to play. When we don’t put in that effort, we go months or years without playing.

Because we like chess, we feel like we should like chess tournaments, and if we don’t play, we think it’s because there’s something wrong with us: we’re lazy, or cowards, or we don’t like chess enough. But maybe there’s a simpler explanation. Maybe the reason so many of us struggle to play regularly is that these tournaments kind of suck!

It’s like if the only ice cream shop in town had a 4 hour wait and was packed shoulder to shoulder with people. I like ice cream, but I don’t like it so much that I’ll tolerate absolutely anything to get it. Especially when I can get ice cream much more easily at home.

OTB tournaments are enormously unpleasant. They’re very costly in terms of time and money. They’re incredibly grueling. They disrupt your eating and sleeping. As IM Greg Shahade wrote in an old blog post, “When I play in today’s standard American chess tournaments, I honestly feel like less of a human being.”

US Amateur East is not a standard American chess tournament. It’s much worse. For one thing, it’s difficult to eat at this tournament. Not difficult to eat well, difficult to eat, period. The healthiest option I could find was a Chipotle, located about 500 yards from the tournament hotel as the bird flies, but a 15 minute drive because of how New Jersey roads work. Fortunately I had a rental car – it probably wouldn’t have been safe to try to walk along the highway. I had three meals at Chipotle and counted myself lucky.

This is one of the only team chess tournaments. That’s cool. Many of the teams are comprised of kids. Also cool. There should be more team tournaments! But what is less cool is that parents and other hangers-on flood every square inch of the hotel. You can’t sit down. You can’t get a coffee – the cafe sports a long line at all hours. I’m sure the parents don’t love being crammed in either.

The time control for the event is game in 100 minutes with an additional 30 minutes on move 40, and 5 seconds delay per move. Bizarrely, this casual team tournament has a slower time control than the FIDE standard for international competition. Games can last four, or even five or six, hours.

Here’s the round schedule.

On the first night, the late round starts at 7:30 PM, so on the first day of the tournament you can easily be playing past midnight. With your sleep destroyed, the tournament next targets your meals. The second day rounds start at 11 AM and 6 PM, trampling right over lunch and dinner. On the third day, having put you into a defenseless stupor by knocking out your sleep and nutrition, the tournament delivers the coup de grace: the early morning round at 9 AM. Good luck getting breakfast before the round starts!

What drives me crazy about this is it’s all completely unnecessary. USATE is so close to the fun, casual tournament I want… yet so far. The team format is a great twist that encourages camaraderie. It’s a great chance to see olds friends – or would be, if you had any time outside of playing your games and desperately trying to recover for the next game. It would be so easy to make the rounds shorter and have them start at the same time each day.

At some point during the weekend I called my wife and told her many of the same things I’ve written in this post. “You know you say this every year, right?” she said. Well no, I didn’t know that. “Yeah,” she continued, “you hate this tournament.” As soon as she said it, I realized she was right.

The main reason I play in tournaments these days is that I hope, by experiencing the pain of tournament chess, I can be a better and more empathetic coach. In that sense I got what I wanted out of this tournament. Maybe a little more than I bargained for. But I wish there were more tournaments that weren’t so painful, tournaments I actually looked forward to playing in.

I’ve heard that when tournament directors survey their players, they often hear that they want longer time controls. Well, this is sort of like surveying the participants in a supermarathon: they’re going to say they like long races. I also suspect that many players who say they want more time would end up preferring shorter time controls if they got accustomed to them. When my opponents go into deep thinks, they often don’t end up making good decisions. And when I review the moves my students spent the most time on, if they were using that time effectively, ostensibly they should be able to produce reams of analysis, but in most cases they only looked at one or two lines. For most players, more time is just an enticement to indecision and stress. If they had less time, they could avoid a lot of the stress without playing noticeably worse.

Still, I don’t begrudge anyone the ability to play in the kind of tournament they like. Grueling and glacially slow is the norm for chess tournaments. I have no doubt these kinds of tournaments will keep going, and if you like them, by all means play in them! USATE is wildly popular. This was the biggest year ever and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s even bigger next year.

But I don’t think the desire for a less brutal tournament is some sort of crazy contrarian take. If we had more tournaments that respected the work and family commitments of normal adults, not to mention basic sleep and nutrition hygiene, it would open up chess tournaments to a whole different group of people. People who love chess, but aren’t willing to tolerate anything and everything to play in a chess tournament.

While USATE is an extreme example, most tournaments in the United States share at least some of these problems:

• Unreasonable round times or schedules

• Sleep disruption

• Difficulty getting healthy meals

• Uncomfortable or unsanitary conditions

It doesn’t have to be this way! We could have chess tournaments that are fun, safe, and don’t require enormous sacrifices to play in.

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I’ve noticed that some of the players I admire most have made a conscious decision to stop playing in OTB tournaments. FM Peter Gianattos, the director of the innovative and successful Charlotte Chess Center, has said that he know longer plays OTB chess because he finds it too stressful. IM Levy Rozman has made a well-documented string of attempts to get back into OTB chess, which usually start out with optimism, but end when the stress and heartbreak of tournament chess interfere too much with his responsibilities as a content creator. Even Magnus Carlsen decided to walk away from the World Championship because the stress and time commitment involved was too overwhelming, and he rarely plays classical chess these days.

What these guys have in common, apart from being talented chess players, is that they have other opportunities adjacent to chess, and they’re independent thinkers who are willing to make unpopular decisions. While I’m obviously not as good at chess as Magnus, or as successful as Levy, on a good day I’d like to put myself on this list. I’m fortunate enough to have other opportunities available to me, and I need to think carefully about whether OTB tournaments are how I want to invest my time.

I know a lot of this may come off as sour grapes because I had a bad result, but the truth is, I had written half of this post before the tournament was over. (It’s not lost on me that this could have contributed to my poor performance.) Of course, chess is more fun when you win than when you lose. But for me, a string of good results was just papering over the aspects of tournament chess that I genuinely don’t like.

Compared to the other things I do – time with my kids, coaching, writing, programming – my own chess improvement is the area I’m least excited about, and the easiest to drop. I’m not going to quit tournaments, but I am going to give myself a break from any goals or deadlines related to my own chess. There’s too much else to do.