My Second Chess Tournament-With Analysis!
Hello my friends, followers, Israel gang members, and peeps, welcome to my second blog. This is about my second USCF rated tourney that I went to Saturday. Because I am unrated, my dad signed me up for the novice division of the tournament. I was put in (excuse me) the UNDER 500 SECTION WHATTTTTTT. I only found out later in the tourney that I was competing with those that had actual ratings of under 500, and so it turned out the games were much less challenging than games I would normally play (unlike last tournament when I was playing mostly other unrated players that were actually pretty close to my strength, which was good! 👍). Note that this post will not feature very instructive games like my last blog did. Because of this, today's entry will be more of how my day went, so if you want to see the games, please feel free to skip ahead of all this until you see the first diagramed game. As always, it was Swiss format, and I got to play five games.
(This was written the evening the tournament happened. Please note that it is written from the perspective of that day.)
The night before, I planned to go to bed super early (asleep by about 7 o'clock) so that I could wake up at 5:30 AM to prepare. If you know me, I am, along with the rest of my family, a complete night owl. I usually wake up late, unless I need to be up early for something. I am also homeschooled, and I have my own school schedule. This is also one reason how I can afford to do this and why I have a lot of time on my hands. However, a friend of my sister's friend needed help moving. She offered to pay $ to help, so I *very reluctantly but hey it's money* agreed to come help unload this moving truck.
The reason why I am saying this is because it was basically a gamble. I could risk getting sleep deprived and perform poorly in the tourney, but I might actually end up getting a lot of money from this (I'm broke, every dollar cannot be wasted). But I agreed to go, since I did okay last time when I didn't get quite enough sleep (about six hours, to be precise! 😁), so I figured it'd be fine. Turns out, it was actually a really good thing that I went. I didn't expect to get much (like only a couple bucks), but I earned WAY MORE than I thought it would be. We got home around 9:30 or so, and I ended up clearing (not deleting) some more notifs on c.c before going to bed.
Well, turns out there was quite a lot of drama that happened last night, things that I could discuss (like my co-owner club getting hacked and getting kicked out of EMP and burger-kitty. Dw we got most of the members back and I'm also back in both clubs now.) but I won't go into all of that here. DM me for the full story on all that if you want it. Then I ended up talking with my sister and mom for quite a while, and in the end, it was nearly (coff coff) 1 AM before I got to sleep.
I woke up at 6 and hopped on the computer, checked my messages and a few (few? yeah right more like 20) notifs, turned on my chess playlist [footnote 1] (which is just top 10 extreme demon OST GD (Geometry Dash) songs and a few Asphalt 8 and 9 OST songs), and started doing my Puzzle Rush. I did terribly at first, since I had just woken up, but I actually got a new best in survival today-32 (I know, I'm trash. Months later I still can't beat my best on that) and I was very surprised. I did about an hour or so of that and then hopped on Chessable, and reviewed some opening lines.
Before we left, I printed off a copy of @ChessKy538's forum on the MASS system, and had my sister drill me during the drive on the different structures' self-evaluations. Here's the forum if you're interested in looking at it, I highly encourage it:
https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/my-own-method-to-evaluate-basic-positions-in-testing
(This is in the Chess.com Community Club btw)
After a few minutes I had it memorized. All I needed then was to practice using it, but I didn't have a chess book with diagrams or anything like that to test it out. Welp.
We arrived, I checked in, and took in my surroundings. There were three divisions that day for the different rating groups (it was Novice, Amateur, and Open) and for some reason:
Novice had NO CLOCKS!
This was very new to me (playing tournament games without clocks), but it made sense after I thought about it. They really don't NEED clocks for this division since the games are over pretty quickly, therefore, there's no real need to actually have them timed. It saves the tourney organizers money by not spending money on more clocks that way ig.
Anyway, here is the first game:
A victory, exactly as I expected (which was partially due to the fact that I entered in Novice). Even though I didn't know beforehand that I was going to be playing only beginners that day.
After the second round, I hung out with some other kids in the Skittles room [Footnote 2] before the next round started, I met a boy named Micah, and we talked for a while about the Candidates and such. I was about to ask if he wanted to play a game, until I realized that we were probably going to get paired with one another. Sure enough, just a few minutes later the TD posted the pairings, and we were paired with one another.
After reflecting on this, I figure not challenging my opponent beforehand really wasn't necessary (since he was a beginner, and not advanced or anything) and likely would have worked more to my advantage instead of his, but like I said, I didn't know I was playing just beginners.
Here's why I thought that I shouldn't: (skip to 1:41-9:29)
After the last round, Micah said that I had tied for first place with someone else, but the problem was, they weren't on the roster for my division. In the end, I did not play that person, and some way or another Micah got confused. So I placed first for my division, and got a medal and a gift card for a board game store in the host city.
I never needed to use the MASS system in my games due to maintaining winning positions for the most part in my games. The MASS system is for self-evaluating basic positions where material is (usually) equal and is mostly strategic, not tactical; or where it may not be clear who is winning.
Here's a pic I took after the prize ceremony: (he agreed that I could post it here)
For some reason, they did not post the final standings, they just announced it in the closing ceremony.
Well, that's all for today. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, you're one in a million. If you see this please comment that you read to the end, I appreciate it a lot. I also appreciate any comments as well. Have a good day everyone, I'll see you in the next one. Thanks for 2,000 profile views, and see you on the 64 squares.
Footnote 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4hg2q2JvkE&list=PLVbEymL-83SyVXXqT7fYX5sEvELvyGjL7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmvbuONWCdU&list=PL4ZdnimzlO0fncNJMfIE8Ta3IGnmZitB:5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQrr81V3ufs&list=PL6v0YAHfvjfkxbfnKoGE95aK9ZUiac60V
Footnote 2: The skittles room is a casual place for players and their parents to play, eat, chat, and rest. Players can also review their games together in the skittles room after finishing tournament games. The skittles room is often the space where players return to until the next game starts. Often, chess boards are provided in the skittles room, and casual games and quiet discussions are encouraged.
