Untitled Tuesday - 7/14/2020

For those of you who don't know, Untitled Tuesday is a parody of Titled Tuesday (recently rebranded to the Speed Chess Championship Grand Prix), a now weekly blitz tournament with cash prizes for titled players. Untitled Tuesday, however, is a tournament with the same format (10 rounds of 3+1 blitz), with no prizes, and no titled players allowed.

Untitled Tuesday also has a Grand Prix style points leaderboard for each year, you can see more about that here. Going into this event, I have 25 points (leaderboard not yet updated), which is not bad given how few of the tournaments I've participated in this year

From now on, I will be setting a pre-tournament goal from a few hours before the tournament (based on how I'd been feeling and playing recently, and another pre-tournament goal about a minute before the tournament, based on how strong the competition is. Both of these will be in bold.

On top of all that, I will be writing down my thoughts directly after each game finishes, those will be in bold as well.

4 hours before the tournament: My goal is 6.5/10; I played some bad chess this morning but I've been doing better in more recent games

~1 minute before the tournament: 6.5/10. Field as strong as last week.

Mid tournament notes will be after the game diagram. I'm writing these based on how I'm doing right after the games finish. 

R1: (No notes)

R2: -_-

I played ry. What do you expect?

R3:

Wow

R4: Playing bad chess. Maybe have a chance at 6/10 if I stop straight up blundering pieces.

R5: Forgot my prep here. Also getting unlucky pairings (both losses to 2300+), but given how badly I've played I'll take it

R6: (No notes)

R7: I definitely feel like I was playing better that game, maybe just luck but I felt like I knew more about the position than my opponent.

R8: I've been on the wrong side of too many mouseslips like that to not give him a draw. 

R9: Terrible game all around. I blunder in the opening like that way too much. Hope I can get an easy win in the last round because I'm just really tired as of now.

R10: He definitely made me work for it, but I'll take it

Final thoughts:

I got my 6.5/10 that I wanted, I guess I should be happy with it. I got 9th, which is also good given the fact that my seeding going into the event was below that. I still feel like I played terribly, which is probably partly because I'm very tired. I'm writing this minutes after the tournament, and right now I'm wiped out. I think I gained about 20 rating points, which is also good. Overall I should be happy, and I probably would be if I deserved to have finished this well. I didn't.

Simply put, I played badly, and somehow still finished decently. It definitely wasn't the cleanest tournament I've ever played, but in the end 6.5/10 is not that bad given the fact that my average opponent rating was 2001.5 

Final standings can be viewed here

I don't really know how to end this blog post, it was a terrible tournament and I'm lucky I didn't lose a billion rating points. 

MM/DD/YYYY - final score - placement (before removing cheaters/after removing cheaters) - blog post link

7/7/2020 - 7.5 - 4th/3rd - link