How I won an 11 round daily chess tournament by playing only 4 games (excluding timeouts)

Hello everyone,

A little bit of a different post this time, but I recently completed an 11-round daily chess tournament spanning from late 2017 to 2023 in which I only played 4 games that were not timeouts in the entire tournament! The format was 250 players, 3 days per move in a custom position and the group size was 2, so you would be playing 2 games per round against 1 opponent with the winner advancing to the next round. Here is the link to the tournament: https://www.chess.com/tournament/all-pawns-tournament 

So let's get into the tournament. It's worth noting that since there were 11 rounds in the tournament, the other finalist who made the last round with me played 22 games by the end of the event (including all games). In 6 of their games, their opponent timed out, but the other 16 their opponent played the game. Compared to me, I only had 4 games where my opponent did not time out. So let's see how this happened by breaking down the tournament round-by-round.

Round 1: My opponent timed out after 10 moves in the first game and then timed out on the first move of the 2nd game

Round 2: My opponent timed out on move 1 in one game and move 2 in the other

Round 3: My opponent timed out on move 1 in both games. I have made round 4 just by logging on to the site and not timing out myself!

Round 4: Here, my opponent was actually active. I won 1 game and drew the other, advancing to round 5

Round 5: My opponent here was also active. I won the first game, then they timed out on the first move of the second game

Round 6: My opponent timed out on move 1 in one game and move 10 in the other.

Rounds 7-10: Here, there was an odd number of players in the tournament and I was the highest rated player, so for these rounds I was in a group of 1 by myself and had automatic advancement into the next round without playing a game. So I went from round 7 to the final round, round 11 without playing a game.

Round 11 (final round): Here I was up against the other finalist, this player who had actually played from rounds 7-10 and also had much fewer timeouts to deal with than me. The first game was fairly uneventful. Unfortunately, the position called for a more passive style as making captures with the pawns normally would allow the opponent to advance their pawns further. We had an early draw in that game. In the second game, I really wanted to win in order to secure the tournament victory, so on move 5, I played bxa4 (link to game: https://www.chess.com/game/daily/487167215), and that was all it took for my opponent to get the initiative. They were pressing and defintely better than me, when they timed out for the first time in the whole event, handing me the victory of the tournament.

Final statistics of the event compared to the other finalist:

  As you can see here, in 11 rounds, I only had 4 games that were not timeouts, and I only won 2 of those (with the other 2 being draws). Comparitavely, my opponent had 16 games that were not timeouts and won 10 of them.

And so, this was the tournament. My motivation in making this post was I have competed in many daily chess tournaments on this site, but I have never had a tournament like this, where there were so many players (250) and so many rounds (11) that I was able to win by playing so few games. Certainly a unique experience!