Desperado: On My Titled Tuesday Marathon
Yes, somehow I played literally all the Titled Tuesday tournaments in 2024 and all the games in them. Thanks to @Chesscom for mentioning it in the summarised year statistics, and to Hikaru Nakamura, who commented on that here and here.
I thought that it would be a fun thing to do for one particular year - indeed, against the odds sometimes, during blackouts/power outages on some days, or, as was the case in my March game versus Magnus Carlsen, during an air-raid and a loud Russian attack on my home city Odessa (Odesa). What adds sense.
There also was such a formally motivating factor in the fight for the highest place among 50+ veterans in the overall Titled Cup, with prizes for the top ten. On the year's final weeks, there was a close rally between three players for places 5, 6 and 7. Eventually, I finished the 6th. (20 best performances for each player were counted for the final standings).
A strange problem in the penultimate game of the year, when I was unable to join my game at all, and got a loss, diminished my chances for occupying the 5th place. But online chess is an electronic sport, and I take it for what it is. Probably, I made a technical mistake by myself, by reloading the page during pairings, or so.
On the whole, there were 106 TT tournaments for me in 2024 and 1166 games in them, with a total score +576 =107 -483. (Best: 8 out of 11, three times).
In December, thanks to the good results in two sessions of the non-tournament rated games, achieved after being, well, somewhat angry with my not sufficiently good TT tournament results, I managed to cross a 2800 barrier in blitz (really wasn’t expecting it from myself!), achieving a new personal best 2814.
All this combined was a good reason for taking (currently) a break from chess competitions in 2025 and to concentrate additionally on my main online coaching work, and on the particular weird things like preparing this blog.
...My best personal classical OTB rating was exactly thirty years ago, 2570 in the first half of 1995, but never in my life have I been so focused on blitz as in the recent years (2018-2024)! So I would call this trip to the intensive online blitz a sensitive part of my overall chess experience.
I played in TTs all my usual openings (such as the Fischer/Sozin attack for White, the Dragon and the King's Indian for Black) endlessly. I also tried a few opening systems (like 3.e5 against the French) that I had never used before. And I also faced most of the world's strongest players of the younger generations, even if not with encouraging performances indeed. How else could I have played against them, taken that I terminated my serious chess career, rarely going out of my city, long before the COVID-19 pandemic and the full-scale Russian war against my country, would be a rhetorical question.
Still, frankly speaking, I would not have survived so many losses in TTs for so long and preserved motivation, without being able to score in these tournaments a bit more than 50% on average. In the year 2024, I was 6th in TTs by the overall number of losses (being the only grandmaster in the respective, sad top ten list), but at least was the 10th by the overall number of wins. Good!
The blitz games most often don’t deserve, objectively, to be shown to other people (if it’s not a stream, but I'm not doing these). Below is a thin selection - in addition to what I already have posted in my blog before.
The first example, even that it was a successful game for me, and not badly played, reveals a problem that I'm looking for tactical solutions more often than necessary. Here such approach worked, but in some other cases it wouldn't:
In the following game I was really glad to discover the tactical refutation of Black's 17th move, even if later found that all this already had occurred before - with White not always finding the right way even in the classical over-the-board chess:
The move 7.Nxc6!? in the Accelerated Dragon leads to an extremely messy fight and, in my case, to very mixed results. Instead, 7.Bc4 is somewhat stronger, probably. But the capture on c6 is funnier:
I almost never played the English Opening as White, besides some training games against my students. So, here is my apparently only tournament with White in this opening, ever:
The most idiotic openings that I used in TTs, and only in a couple of games, were 1.Na3, 2.c3 for White, or the same setup with Black. After all, I remember that Tony Miles played like this against some top over-the-board opponents. The following was perhaps my most satisfying achievement of the kind:
Also, one example from the non-tournament 3+0 blitz:
...I also have games, connected with more serious or curious opening topics than you could above. Hopefully, I will cover them some other time.
Already for many years, from time to time I’m posting all my preserved chess games (of any kind, except the non-tournament online chess) at my personal web page. They can be found here.
