Tournament Preparation Update

Things never go like you plan

There’s less than one month to go until my first tournament in over a year. How’s my preparation going? Not as well as I hoped, to be honest.

The biggest snag, as is often the case, didn’t really have anything to do with chess. My one-year-old recently decided to stop sleeping, so I’ve had a lot less time and energy for everything, including chess.

Nonetheless, I still have a month to prepare, which is a pretty solid timeframe to get ready for a tournament. So it’s a good time to reboot and make a new plan. Fortunately I had access to two grandmasters to bounce some ideas off of, my co-author Eugene Perelshteyn and friend Noël Studer. With their help I’m feeling pretty good about my plan going forward. It’s interesting to compare their advice and see where they agreed, and where they disagreed.

Openings

Both Eugene and Noël recommended committing to a narrow repertoire for the tournament and honing it until I feel really confident. This is the approach I usually recommend as well, so I was more than happy to adopt it. The alternative is to use a broader repertoire to be less predictable, and/or target specific opponents by varying your choices. But in my experience the added work of preparing multiple openings, and the added stress of trying to prepare things during the tournament, just isn’t worth it. I prefer to know what I’m going to play in advance. Then I can use the time during the tournament to rest and prepare to play with as much energy and focus as I can.

As far as which openings I’ll use, I had already invested a lot of time into creating a 1. Nf3 repertoire for my Chessable course (coming out August 11!!!), so that was an easy choice. The Black openings are a little trickier, but I’ve settled on something against 1. e4. (I don’t want to reveal it in case any opponents read this newsletter!) I still need to decide what I’ll use against 1. d4 though. That’s probably the biggest single thing I need to take care of before the tournament.

One other thing that neither Eugene nor Noël told me to do specifically, but I’ve decided to make a bigger part of my opening preparation, is playing blitz games. I like to update my repertoire one move at a time and blitz games provide great fodder for that approach.  A common theme between both Eugene and Noël’s advice was that one of the most important parts of preparation is doing what allows you to feel confident. For me, the thing that makes me confident playing an opening is having used a line in blitz and reviewed the lines I faced.

Tactics

You might expect grandmasters to advocate doing really hard tactics, but both Noël and Eugene suggested dialing back the difficulty a little. Again, it’s all about feeling confident going into the tournament. They also both emphasized board vision and spotting the opponent’s resources. They were less concerned about accurately calculating long variations and more interested in seeing all the reasonable candidate moves. Most calculation errors occur early in the tree, often missing candidates on move 1 or 2, so the most important thing is to see the board and the options clearly.

This isn’t to say there’s no place for deep and difficult calculation training. Sometimes you should try to push your limits with really intense training. But immediately before a tournament probably isn’t the best time for that. Tournament preparation is more about getting ready to use the skills you have than trying to develop new skills.

Noël also emphasized the role of periodization in training. Periodization is the idea that you don’t train the same way all the time, you have a plan to maximize your results over time. As applied to the tournament, he recommended doing the most difficult training about a month before the tournament (uh-oh, that’s now!) and gradually tapering down as the event approaches. The last few days before the tournament, he suggested no training at all, just resting and relaxing. Periodization is a very common approach in sports training, but less well-known in chess.

Endgames

Endgames were the one area where Eugene and Noël had significantly different recommendations. Noting that the time control for this event is pretty fast (110 minutes plus a 10 second increment for the game) Eugene felt that playing endgames in time pressure would be a big factor in this event, so he suggested practicing practical endgames with a rapid time control. In contrast, Noël said that his own games were rarely decided in the endgame, so it was more of a personal decision: if I was also a player that doesn’t get to the endgame very often in my games, I might not want to emphasize that.

When I reviewed my tournament games, I found I was more like Noël: my games are rarely decided in the endgame. More often, I crush (or get crushed) in the middlegame. This in itself is interesting and probably reflects the type of choices I make during the game. Junta Ikeda has an interesting article about this. In any case, I was definitely happy to take any chance to train with Eugene in the endgame or otherwise, but given that my preparation timeline is already compressed beyond what I was expecting, I’m not planning to make endgames a big part of the work I do on my own.

Conclusion

My biggest takeaway, both from talking to Eugene and Noël and from my review of my own tournament games, was that the most important thing to focus on going into a tournament is being calm, focused, and confident. For that reason I’m going to really focus on solidifying an opening repertoire I’m comfortable with for this tournament, and seeing the board and candidate moves clearly.

Even though I have less than a month left, I’m feeling pretty good about getting ready for this tournament. There’s just one thing. Does anyone know a good defense against 1. d4?