Preparing for a Tournament

The top three things I'd do if I started prepping for a tournament tomorrow

In the past week or two I’ve started to get the itch to play some over-the-board chess again. I often see people ask what they should do to prepare for a tournament, so today I’ll go over three things I would do to get ready.

Vysotsky

1. Focused Blitz
   Blitz gets a bad rap, with some people even saying it ruins your chess, but like almost anything else, it’s less about what you do and more about how you do it. If you play blitz in a focused way it can be a great way to work on your chess.
   
   I’ve found the keys for me to get more out of blitz are A) decide in advance how many games to play and stick to it, and B) analyze every game. For me, four games is a good length for one blitz session. I usually get two whites and two blacks, and I can play the games and quickly analyze them in about half an hour (I usually play 3+0 because this is the time control where it’s easiest for me to find games).
   
   In terms of efficiency it’s best to play all the games and then analyze all of them, but if you’re prone to going on tilt when playing blitz, analyzing each game immediately after you play it can be a good way to give yourself a break and reinforce the idea that you’re playing to learn, not to win.
   
   I analyze my blitz games very quickly, just checking the opening, any blunders, and maybe one or two moments I was curious about during the game. Of course, going through the game first without the engine would be great, but it’s all about the time investment. It’s also a good idea to dump all the games in a Lichess study or ChessBase file with a note on the most important takeaway from each game. I find when I save the games in this way, key moments often become strategic touchstones that come to mind easily during more important games.

2. Rapid Training Games
   Of course, blitz is mostly intuition, so I also like to play some slower games to practice calculation and decision making. In theory, if you’re preparing for a classical tournament, it seems like it would make sense to play classical games online, and this could work great if you can find the time and focus for it. Personally, I just don’t see myself sitting in front of my computer focusing on one classical game for hours. I’ll play classical at the tournament and that’s it. The great thing about rapid is it lets me get 80% of the value of classical in 20% of the time. I still get to calculate and play a tense game, just in a much more compressed format.
   
   For blitz I’ll just fire up a game and play whoever I get paired with, but for rapid I’ll arrange a match with someone I know. It’s harder to find opponents for rapid with a random seek, and ideally I’d like to practice against someone stronger than me. Fortunately at this point I have plenty of chess friends I can reach out to for a few practice games. Playing a match with someone you know also means you can agree to practice a specific opening if you want to and analyze the game afterwards.

3. Calculation Exercises on a Real Board
   There’s a huge difference between looking at a computer screen and a real, 3d chess board. Just about everything I do with chess when I’m not preparing for a tournament is on a computer, so if I have a tournament coming up I like to get used to seeing the pieces on a real board. I like to do some difficult exercises to get used to the feeling of calculating at the board. I’m looking for positions that take a few minutes each and where I can get about 70-90% right. In the past I’ve used Grandmaster Training: Calculation by Aagaard and Imagination in Chess by Gaprindashvili, but I don’t think the source of the positions actually matters that much, as long as they’re at an appropriate difficulty level. It’s all about practicing your thought process - there aren’t any magical positions that suddenly make you better at chess.

I might combine those activities in a schedule like three blitz sessions a week, two calculation sessions, one rapid training session, and one day off. If I stick with that for a month I feel like I can go into a tournament feeling confident and prepared. It’s always nice to take a few days completely off before the tournament as well, so you can go in feeling really fresh and excited to play.

What do you do to prepare for a tournament?