Road to the Washington Open

I've played in the Washington Open the past two years, twice in the u1800 section with even results. In 2017 my performance rating was about 1450, and in 2018 1650, but on the ground in Washington I'm not sure there's much of a difference in playing strength between 1400 rated juniors and 1600 rated adults, so I'm guessing the difference in performance was less from playing tougher opponents and more from luck of the rating pairings skewing the number higher.

Both times I played the two day schedule, and I remember feeling pretty burnt out at the end, especially last year when the tournament had seven rounds instead of six. I've never taken a tournament bye, mostly because I feel I want to play as many games as possible. Furthermore I've never 'prepared' for a tournament, or had any chess training regimen for that matter.

Given all that, this year I'm going to change things up a bit. I've registered for the three day schedule, and plan to use at least one bye to help with a slower pace and higher quality games. Also I'm going to focus more on training. I looked around at different options for tactics training, such as chess.com, Chessable, Chess Tempo, CT-ART, and so on, but I'm going to keep it simple for now and train simple tactics daily (since I'm terrible at tactics this should be fine I think). I'm going to play around one 15 10 game a day and spend time after the game on analysis. Finally I'm going to play guess the move with the games in the chess book I'm about to start reading. In a couple of weeks I'll evaluate whether I should train more intermediate tactics.

The Open is about a month away and I think that's a good amount of time to see results if I can consistently train until then.