Untitled Tuesday 7/21/2020

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 33 points, 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. This time, I forgot to set one a few hours before the tournament. Oh well

~1 minute before the tournament: My goal is 6.5, maybe 7 if I get lucky. Competition is strong as always, with 20 2000+ at the start of the tournament

R1: He made me work for it but I found a way through. I feel like I’m having to think harder to find moves that I’d see quicker normally. I’m definitely tired

R2: Surprised he played that poorly. He lost a lot of rating points recently, so he’s really 1950 strength

R3: This is just another example of what I’m talking about. I’m so tired that I completely missed the fact that I lost an exchange with that

R4: I definitely don't feel like I'm playing like I normally do. After 3… e5  dxe5 dxe5 my plan was obviously to take his queen but I’m so out of rhythm today I played Nf3 out of habit. Didn’t even see the bishop trap until after I played the move 

Okay, so this was where I last saved the blog. I was almost done with it, but then my computer crashed -_-

I'm really tired so I'm just going to leave it here. You can see all of my tournament games here

R5: He played badly that game. I feel like I made some mistakes as well, after the breakthrough. Will have to analyze later.

R6: I suck. I wasted 2 minutes calculating the last 4 moves, looking thoroughly into that Ba6 threat just to blunder it as it looks like it’s heading towards a draw

R7: Feel like I played better and positionally too that game

R8: Surprised I won that one. My position looked really bad early on. Will also be interesting to analyze

R9: Well, there go my chances at a good record and a decent placement. I guess I’ll take it, though

R10: Tough game. I really had a good tournament given how badly I played, but these tournaments are getting worse and worse for me every week. 14th is terrible even though it is around my initial seeding, I certainly should have done better this tournament.

Final thoughts:

Well, I've been doing worse and worse every week. Hopefully next week will be different, but I'll take what I can get when it comes to this tournament. 

The final standings can be viewed here

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

7/7/2020 - 7.5 - 4th/3rd - link

7/14/2020 - 6.5 - 9th/9th - link