My Top 5 Best OTB Games and How You Can Prepare For Yours.

Hello. I've been meaning to make a blog about all me OTB tips, but I thought, that if I had it on its own, it might become a little boring without the games. So, I thought that I should add some of my best OTB games from the last few years. Almost all of these games have come from the last year, so I'll have a pretty good grip on them. I also gained more than 300 rating points (ACF) in over the board classical from the start of the September. 

Introduction:

General Tips For OTB

My Very Own Tips For Classical OTB

The Best Games That I Have Ever Played

Common Traps and Failures

General Tips For OTB

This is going to be filled with the general tips for OTB, but after this, I will show you my personal tips: the most counterintuitive ones:

Some of the most common OTB tips can help you develop skills for these scenarios. 

The most common tips are about using your own chess board to practise the game. 

Playing a game with a friend is the easiest way to achieve this, but playing under other conditions, like with spectators can also help. 

Another tip is to play in longer time controls like 30 minutes, but this often depends on if you are playing classical or not. The entire idea of this is to build the endurance needed for a long, hour-long game. You can also achieve this endurance from long study sessions or just being in university. 

Of course, properly analysing games really can help. If it's your opponent, a friend, or even the stockfish engine after the tournament, it can really help to understand how to play, and when to go for a certain objective.

The final tip is about doing puzzles; it has been stated a ton but is probably the easiest way to build up chess skill. If you are playing a classical game, the easiest way to play, is take what you're subconsciously thinking, see if it works, and if it does, expand on it. That is how I have won many of the games that you'll see later in the blog.

My Very Own Tips For Classical OTB

These next few tips may seem ridiculously counter-intuitive but can really help. 

The first tip is about the whole process of a classical game. This may sound strange, but to get your body ready, as if you are going to sleep, can actually help!

The idea of this, is to calm the body down and get it into an endurance-based thought process. Imagine if you are running a 100-metre sprint, you would have to have a pretty fast pace to win right? What if it was raised to a kilometre-long run? You would have to a run much slower pace to combat the change. As the distance gets longer and longer, you would have to slow down the pace accordingly. The same thing is true with chess, though it obviously is much less extreme.

In longer time controls, chess can be very similar to this metaphor, if you play for too long, it can be very boring, and you definitely don't want to make that easier to happen. The easiest way to do that though, is to be impatient. 

Sleeping is probably the best ways to relax your mind, as when it gets impatient, it tends to spiral in that loop of distracted thoughts. This leads to the next simple change. 

Another simple change is to prepare your body in both mental and physical ways. As I mentioned in the previous topic, relaxation can be a very crucial helper to the game. As it doesn't deviate much from the last topic, I will shorten it. Other simple ways to help avoid being impatient for the game, can include:

1. Listen to calm music if it is available.
2. Not eating large amounts of food in a 1–3-hour long periods before the game, depending on how large the meal is. 
3. Don't get into an argument or something stupid.
4. Adapt to parts of the environment of the chess room. 
5. Focus on the game until you are at the level where mind games are necessary.

There isn't much else to say with these, but they are still great for people to practise. 

Another tip is to make a king safety move every 10 moves. I feel like this is a good balance, but this of course can be lengthened. Unfortunately, this often happens to beginners and intermediate players, due to either a failed attack, or one that was once scary for the opponent, but now has subsided. Often, it causes once-winning positions to ones that can't be defended. This is one of my best online games, but you can see how my attack crumbled and led way to an attack.

The Best Games That I Have Ever Played

Throughout my relatively small-time frame that I have played competitive chess; I have played many brilliancies and great games. I want to show you some of the better ones. Because of the relatively small chess community in South Australia, I don't think sharing names of the opponents is frankly necessary, nor a good thing to do, so I won't include their names and won't include mine, I'll instead refer to myself as something as simple as "me," and my opponents as opponent. big surprise there.

 My 5th best game:

This game was pretty hard to choose, as there were many options, but I chose this game after a very crazy tournament. If I remember correctly, it had a 25-minute timer and took a while to ultimately draw. The player was pretty good at a chess.com rating probably around 1700.

4th best game:

Sorry for the "humour..." It sounded better in my head. This next game was only a few games before the last one. This game was the only game I have ever came late to. The clock was down about 2 minutes when I arrived. I believe this is the highest rated player I have ever beaten; however, I have drawn a game which is featured at the top spot.

3rd best game:

This is both the shortest, at only 14 moves, and most recent game on this list. I found an insane idea after realising that their queen was rapidly running out of squares. This is actually the first classical game on this list, so it will have a different rating system.

2nd best game:

This next game was in the tournament I had previously mentioned: This is probably one of my only OTB games with 2 brilliants; so, I think it definitely deserves a spot around here:

This is definitely should be a contender for the top spot, as it has two brilliants. but only one can be the best:

The best game I have ever played over the board:

This was the best game and was a simul, so I helped a friend of mine while he helped me find a way to avoid the 2200+ rated player's attacks. On his board, I suggested this one path which I believed would allow him to at least draw the game. However, he decided to go down the other path, and the position became undefendable. It took a while for the 2200+ player to come around, as there were about 20 people around us. My position eventually became very stable and remarkably defendable. All the games were stopped after an hour. I was the only one to not lose. I even think, that if the game had continued, I might've even won.

Common Traps and Failures.

Most of these will apply to chess in general, such as not factoring in king safety, ignoring pawn and piece weaknesses and much more.

One of the most common mistakes in both sides of chess, is not taking a moment to think about where the opponent is planning to go. This can be as short as a 5-second think but can change the course of the entire game. This leads to the next tip, which is very similar to this last one. 

After a long calculation, you should factor in the tiny, but important changes in the position. Often times, this can snowball into the end of your game. An insignificant rook opening up can lead to back rank, a pawn being left with nothing to stop it from promoting. All of these may seem obvious, but after a minute-long calculation, it can be as obvious as calculating the entire thing from the start.

Of course, if you are like me, you can sometimes blitz out classical games. If this does happen to you, sometimes, you might just blunder. To stop this, I use my intuition, and then calculate if it immediately fails, and then continue from there. Often, I do this in the opening and wonder why the rest of my game lacks in quality. I personally allow myself around 20 per cent of the timer in the first 15 moves, but if I know the theory, it can be a low as 5 per cent.

So, these are the last of my tips. I hope you can win your future OTB games! Of course, these are more focused towards classical games but should be able to help in other forms of the game. Anyways, I hope you like this blog! I will try to post things more frequently but there's still a good amount of stuff to do. Anyways, thank you for reading this blog!