2022 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship: Pour Another Round

The 2022 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship commenced on January 1 with a whopping 33,633 participants. Only one player from each of 2,803 groups of 12 can advance, unless there is a tie at the top.

I was extremely fortunate to find myself in a group where I was the highest-rated player, though I am below 1700. My good fortune continued as my opponents timed out of nine games. That still left me with 13 games, and I figured I would probably need them all to advance.

The first thing I discovered was to throw out the opponents' ratings. I was matched against a 400, who was a 400 only because he had never played daily before. However, he had amassed almost 7,300 rapid games. He was very tough.

As the matches progressed, I came to realize that most of my opponents had clearly not read any of my "How to Beat Me" series of blog posts. They played "inaccurate" moves, they resigned before absolutely necessary, they played too quickly, they didn't take advantage of my meager supply of openings, and, worst of all, they let me be sneaky.

I opened the cutlery drawer and whipped out my entire set of forks.

Here, an opponent took what looked to be a free pawn, then retreated to the wrong square, leading to a nice queen-king fork.

This next trap I've seen many times in videos of the Four Knights opening, but I was never able to do it myself. This one just fell into my lap at move 4.

Nxe4 looks like a mistake, because the pawn is defended, but after White responds with Nxe4, you do this.

Finally, here was a situation where Black is threatening my knight on b5. Without a decent retreating square, I tried this.

All of you are now screaming, "Don' take the knight!" But he took the knight.

As I write this, I have been victorious in my first 20 games, and am leading comfortably in the last two. Since everyone else in the group has at least two losses, I am guaranteed to advance to the second round.

This is a big achievement for me, despite my very good fortune in how things got set up. It will be a long time before the second round begins, and I will no doubt face opponents higher-rated than I am. I have no illusions about my chances to advance further, but my goal is to finish in the top half of my second round group, with visions of doing better in 2023.

Playing 22 games at once is a challenge, but I encourage everyone next year to join the most monstrously large online daily tournament on the planet (I think). Stay tuned!