How to Prepare for a Tournament!

So. Let's say you have a big tournament coming up. To do your best at the tournament, here are a few things that you should do to ready up.

First, you'll need to choose a great opening to play as White or Black. Pick one of your most common repertoires that you play. In my opinion, very important tournaments aren't the best place to try out something new. One thing I recommend is going to your stats for openings, and checking which openings have the highest win/lose ratio.

If you have a lot of time, then you could really make sure you have your openings drilled in your brain by going to https://chesstempo.com/opening-training in ChessTempo. This site has many features that are really helpful for improving your chess, including an opening trainer. Just enter in your moves and it will test you for as long as you want.

Next is endgames. Refresh yourself on different endgames so that you can win these during your tournament. You'll want to mainly focus on specific endgame scenarios rather than broad endgame tips, as the first is mainly memorization. For example, the Lucena position:

Some good ways to learn/review these are through Chess.com's Drills, or, if you're premium, then Endgames is even better. You probably can't do this right before a tournament, but for future tournaments you should buy the book 100 Endgames You Must Know, as it's really good at teaching you essential endgames. You could also buy the Chessable version instead!

Your last preparation before the tournament should be tactics. This is to sharpen your tactical chess instincts in you brain. You're going to want to do a lot of puzzles, so unless you have platinum or diamond membership you'll probably need another website. (Sorry Chess.com)

There are many good websites to use. If you have a Lichess account use that (I still like the site better in general) or return to ChessTempo, as they have an even better tactics trainer. However, I use The Woodpecker Method on Chessable.

Whether you're buying the book version or the Chessable verion (recommended) this is probably the best tactics book. It has hundreds of tactics of many types, and has five levels, Beginner, Intermediate I, Intermediate II, and Intermediate III, and Advanced. This got me from 1400 to 1800, (and I'm only in Intermediate Exercises II) and could do wonders for you too.

So these are a few ways to get yourself ready for a tournament. Tournaments can also be quite stressful at times, so if you take a loss, don't let it affect you. Thanks for reading, and good luck in your future games!