Chop Wood, Carry Water: Out Of Rotation

Time to next tournament (Evanston Chess May 2018 Tri-Level): 1 day.

My friends Benjamin and Cat — the former of whom has been my tournament buddy and training partner for the past few months — moved into a new apartment this month. In preparation for the move, I retrieved some of my belongings, which they had been graciously holding in their storage locker. In one of my storage bins I found my old chess set.

The board is scratched and scuffed, but I kinda like it that way. The pieces were a bigger problem — several White pawns and the Black queen were missing. I plan on buying a new set of pieces to pair with this board. In the meantime, I’m using my backup tournament pieces (shown above).

So, I’ve had a busy and stressful few weeks. Some of it was related to my day job, some of it was related to home and personal life drama. As a result, I haven’t done as much prep work for this tournament as I would’ve liked.

On some level I’m okay with that. I feel like maybe I over-prepared for my first tournament and ended up psyching myself out. In fact, I’ve been wondering how much of the weakness in my game is due to mentality issues. I’ve noticed that I can have a solid enough understanding of theory and ideas on my own time, but then once I actually sit down at the board (even in casual social games!) my brain just turns to mush and I end up hanging pieces.

So to some extent I want to see how I’ll do with stripped-down preparation. And then after this weekend I can compare and contrast and try to find some middle-ground.

I don’t want to make it seem like I’m just coming up with post-hoc rationalizations. I should’ve done more preparation for this event, and I didn’t. I have explanations but no excuses. If I faceplant tomorrow it’s entirely on me.

(I mean shit, I haven’t even updated this blog in a few weeks. Real Life just sucks sometimes.)

I’m more or less caught up on day job work at the moment. My plan for the rest of the day is studying for tomorrow. I’m not cramming — that will create more problems than it’ll solve — but there’s a few things I want to work on. Basic endgame principles. Prophylactic play. Things like that.

I’ve also been looking into a new opening. I may or may not use it tomorrow, but it’s definitely a medium-term goal of mine to add this to my repertoire.

Also on the agenda for today: get through a chapter or two of Nimzowitsch, and maybe a couple of games from Chernev. I’m going to try to not play any Blitz games today, but oh, the temptation is so so strong.

And then I just need to get lots of sleep tonight and give myself enough time tomorrow morning to have breakfast. This tournament has a longer time control than the last one I played in — G/40, 5 sec delay — so it’s going to be a long day.

Mostly though, I need to give myself permission to fail. My USCF rating is still provisional and will be for a while. (Even if I do a tournament a month, I won’t hit the 25 game threshold until probably sometime next year.) I need to remind myself that things will be okay even if I lose every game tomorrow. (Which I might.) Life will go on regardless, but also it doesn’t mean my career as a chess player is illegitimate. I have plenty of time to improve and recover.

Alright, back to work. I’ll have a tournament postmortem on Monday or Tuesday.