First OTB prep advice

hey yeah! Just post some of your games in this threat and we will help analyze them and train you! >:)

Also, here is another piece of advice I just remembered: apple juice and chocolate and your best friends for grueling afternoon games (they help your focus).  Bobby Fischer, I've heard, used to imbibe apple juice and chocolate during his matches.

Will do.  15 games.  It won't be pretty, especially with the clock.  But it won't be that exciting either...game 1 = "you hung your rook", game 2 = "you fell for an old queen trap", game 3 = "you hung your rook" game 4 = "you hung your rook", game 5 = "you hung your king", etc...nonetheless I am excited.  

Congratulations, and welcome to the top 5% of most courageous players on chess.com 

I have gone wild and have decided to enter my first tournament 6 weeks earlier than anticipated, and this event will take place this Saturday.  

Sound my barbaric yelp, Charlie Brown style...AAAAAAUUUUGGGGGHHHHH.

I have completely neglected the opening (I don't even think I remember even the 3rd move of my black and white repertoires in every scenario) and any strategy/positional play, preferring the nice concrete world of simple tactics and simple endgames, and seeing how that mess goes.  

Hopefully, this will help me a little for my 2nd tournament, which will be in September.  Thanks for everyone's advice.  

Good luck! You'll do great.

http://blog.chess.com/dannyhume/my-otb-games

I finally popped my OTB che...

...ss non-experience is the end of that sentence.  

I just created the above blog to post my first OTB games.  If this doesn't work, I may just post the games here in this thread.  

Thanks for the advice everyone!

"It was I who deviated from the openings (in my repertoire) first in all of my games, simply because I forgot my repertoire lines, having decided a few weeks earlier that I'd continue drilling tactics, endgames, and some chess mentor <1200 lessons"

Hate to say that Teary told you so but...

Remember, 'memorizing' opening lines isn't the only way to 'study' openings--you've got to study and learn the overall goals, ideas and basic formations behind the openings. And if you ignore that aspect of your tournament preparation, you are likely to end up in bad positions early on (Teary squirmed at at 5.Bd3 in the Caro-Kann game x_x ).

But other than that, it seems like you did a great job for a first OTB tourney! You did a lot better than Teary did his first time out anyways...*cough* 0-5 *cough*. You'll be winning these things in no time!

    Very good presentation, you have a good and organized head, if you were a race horse, I would put my money on you in your future competitions!

Thanks Teary and GhostNight.  Wish I could do more of these as frustrating those losses were.  It'd be nice to find a simple 1-day tournament from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.  rather than these 3 day affairs that go from morning to evening.