OTB - how to get started?

Thanks for the advice Zacer and I totally agree with your advice on calculation and Online correspondence.  Before I went in for the Open in August, I had spent almost a whole year playing pretty much exclusively correspondence, lulling myself into the false belief that it would translate to OTB ability.  There are definitely useful things you can learn from it, but after the Open I made an effort to significantly reduce the number of Online games I have going (I now only have 4), play more Live chess online (45/5) and also go over master games with a real board to help acclimatize myself to it.  I think it totally paid off.

good playing T4T

Keep up the good work

(Sorry, I know this is basically almost a whole page of me babbling ...)

Yes, I completely agree with this.  Like the last tourney, in most of my games I was out of book by about move 6.  Although I had done some work on the Black side of the Two Knight Defence, as I got beat in that twice last time (I'll post that game later).  Also, some of the prep with the Panov Botvinnik and Maroczy Bind came in handy and I wish I had known more about how to play against the Schevengingen for game 2.

I think what's more useful at my level though is learning what the main plans and ideas are in the positions, not spending hours memorizing specific lines.

My advice:

If you U2000, play openings people think  are bad.

I play 1.b4 1.g4 and against 1.e4 c5 a cheecky line played mostly by me.

In a day I'll post the answer

P.S--> I'm 1728 FIDE

Everytime I see "OTB" I think about Obey The Brave.

Don't lose your head!

It's Over The Board

Sorry, which Rook move are you referring to, RobK44?

I was under time pressure, plus it was my first OTB tourney and I was playing badly in general and making a lot of blunders. Hopefully the games I played this weekend show that I can play a lot better than that! :-)

In general I found the standard of play higher than I expected and the intensity is also noticeably higher than casual play online.

Thanks for the advice.  I agree there's some surprise value in some of those more unusual openings, plus it instantly takes the opponent out of their normal opening repertoir.  Maybe I should take one up as a surprise alternative weapon :-)

Here's the 3rd game I played - I was on the Black side of the Two Knights Defence 4.Ng5 gambit line.  I haven't had great results with it so far and I lost 2 games with it in the last tourney, so I had done some prep and studied Black's usual replies to White's most common moves after 7..bxc6.  It's probably the most open, tactical game that I played, with some fun sacrifices.  I don't think my opponent played a particularly strong game though - he seemed more interested in gobbling my Queenside pawns than protecting his King.  Eventually I broke through and mated him with 2 Queens in the middlegame.

Very nice games! 

I liked upen2002's comment.  I tried to do exactly that in my last tourney.  For the first time ever I played the "Old Hungarian Defense", avoiding all the Fried Liver and Italian game lines.  You might want to check it out.

http://www.chess.com/article/view/avoiding-the-fried-liver-the-hungarian-defense

Obviously I did not get an advantage right out of the opening, but I survived, managed to create some weaknesses and win the game.

Yeah otb tournaments are just far more competitive than online chess. Everyone is trying their absolute hardest and even the lower rated people you should always beat dont go down easily. 

If you are worried about the embarrasement of losing to children you should get over it right now because there is nothing wrong with losing a game of chess to someone much younger. I'm 1850 uscf and I still lose to talented kids all the time.

Lee I think your correspondance chess will definitely translate to otb, but calculation is kind of like a hurdle that you have to get over in order for any of that knowledge to be of use. For instance if you are dropping your pieces it doesnt really matter if you know what pawn structures are beneficial in end games. So you should be able to progress more quickly than someone who is just coming into otb without any prior experience. 

@BoardOfWar, I think generally you will find more kids than adults, simply because kids have more time to spend on Chess, whereas we adults have family responsibilities etc. over weekends.  What I have also experienced is that the parents who take their kids to these weekend OTB events generally don't play themselves.

Not an extreme rarity. I would say its like 70% kids in the section you would be playing in.

Actually looking at the registrants from my last tournament it was more like 50-50 for the U1400 section. Not sure about below that.

Yeah the higher you go there are less kids.

In the U1400 section I just played in, it was probably 70-80% kids.  I've played 11 OTB tourney games now and the oldest person I've played was probably about 14-15.  Although there were a handful of adults on the boards around me - some dads were playing as well .

I don't mind getting beat by kids at all.  Even at 7 or 8, many of them are strong veterans of many tournaments and are probably being coached by experienced players/masters as well, or have older siblings in the higher rating groups.  I'm finding that age doesn't really mean anything on the chess board!

I played 23 games total this year, and 13 of those were against people younger than 18, so more than half of the players I face are kids in tournaments.  I'm 6-5-2 against them and I was outrated in either 10 or 11 of these games, so 65.4% is a pretty good result!