2024 daily chess championship R1

Rambling introduction

6 players completely timed out, 2 more players basically completely timed out, but 3 players were good enough to have moved on had they have been in another group.

Before everything, I will say that the ability to use opening books/databases really carries several games to victory. I think lichess has the most extensive database, with not only master games but also around 3 billion user games.

So in a sense, my wins felt kinda lucky. My opponents could have played better moves.

Manuel000001 was playing 1... a6 and 2... b5 in all their games as black. And chinmaylade found an amazing counter...

This trick probably won't work in higher levels of gameplay.

Now one thing often said in the comments is that you should play with the same amount of quality, regardless of rating. For example, some people saw some low rating, but didn't check the profile and see what other ratings, and lost a game as a result.

For this , the solution is to check the profile.

Practically one can of course choose your givings of effort, to be efficient. If a player is really that bad, then the sudden jump of skill that would be needed to win would be enough to prove cheating, unless you played bad. I do want to emphasize that all moves should be "good" but they can be suboptimal. The difference between a few minutes deciding on a move and a few hours is a little bit of quality and a lot of effort.

I'd say that a difference of 300 points is not much, especially at lower levels.

I will reemphasize how important openings are. I had (cpu) leela v0.30.0 self-play (10k nodes max) with the opening 1. e4 a6:

In other words, a6 was kinda a game-losing move at this level. (For the first 10 moves or so, the eval stayed the same so there was decent potential for a draw)

play slower

Playing too fast directly lost me quite a few half-points. Be careful

I will emphasize that everyone can blunder: https://www.chess.com/library/collections/awesome-games-2dBUnQasQ https://lichess.org/ArMFzqXJ  https://lichess.org/ArMFzqXJ

vs Manuel000001

I had conditional moves for those last few moves which was a big factor in winning before all of Manuel's other games timed out.

vs natemcfeters

Let's go slightly unchronological and do both games.

vs jmpeppers41

Not much to say in that game, but now I kinda understand the catalan. Or at least this variation, where white plans to push the center pawns and black plans to push the wing pawns. (Much later: This is the grunfeld not the catalan)

This leads me to another thought: understand what you are doing, concretely (material or positional). This helps avoid overthinking. And helps learn.

Ok... I ended up not finishing, and there's only one game left until round 2 so I'd better finish and post something up quick. The last 3 games might be a little less commented than ideal.

vs srshriram

Not really much to say. Literally just came out of the opening (albeit with a "simple" inaccuracy losing a tempo)