Tournament Thinking

That's a lot of people playing Chess! There are probably just as many different thoughts going through those heads, as there are Heads!

Being relatively new, not just to tournaments, but to Chess in general I've noticed some unusual thinking that I can't really explain. In an online tournament you always play two games, one as White and one as Black, which is not usually the case in regular over-the-board tournaments. I'll come back to some thinking about that in a couple of minutes.

I bring this up because my rating rise has been quite slow so far, and obviously that's because I don't play enough games. But, I don't really like the unknown opponent style of the 30 minute Rapid game, and I just don't think quick enough to play Bullet or Blitz. To get more games, I'm back to trying tournaments where I least get some time to research the recent past of my opponent. A couple of months ago I wrote about Preparation and what I'm doing for that. What I'm doing hasn't changed from what I described there, but I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of any feedback on the topic.

It's important! Surely you've got something to say!

Anyway,  one aspect of the two-game online tournament model is how many players will give their move for both games, at the same time, which seems a bit odd to me.

I like to solve puzzles in bite sized pieces. I work on what looks like a part of the puzzle will be easily solved, and then expand on that. In Chess terms, to me that means that if I've got the next steps to one of my games ready to go, I'll write them out and play a move, and then let my opponent start face-whacking his head on the desk.

At the very least my opponent has a sore head sooner than I do. If I can get an easy game out of the way, Great! I'll have more brain power available for the harder game and I don't have a sore head (yet).

So, back to what I've noticed is a lot of players giving moves in both games, at the same time, when one of those moves was obviously ready go for while. I mean, you're in Check, mate. You've really only got one possible move.

Why not play it, and move on to other game? But so many of my opponents don't? They hold back on the obvious move until the other game is ready to go too, then present both moves. I don't understand that thinking and I'm hoping someone here can enlighten me.