Challenge 2500 | 3. A Step Forward!

Hello there! This blog entry will be all about the Staufer-Open 2023 (https://www.staufer-open.de/), a 9-round tournament I competed in this week.
As this was the first tournament of 2023 and as I felt like I was in good form after the previous tournament, I was hoping to do well and very much motivated to do so.
Again, let's begin with the facts: a rating performance of 2511, a change in FIDE rating of +11. Now those numbers are certainly nicer to look at than last time. Proud of the result, a sizable step in the right direction!

How the tournament went

...pretty smoothly: I alternated between winning with White and drawing with Black from start to finish.
Starting with the White pieces in the first round, this put me at 5 wins, 4 draws and a final score of 7/9.
One thing I like about this tournament is that pairings are calculated using the 'Baku Acceleration Method' (https://handbook.fide.com/chapter/C0405), which is essentially an accelerated version of the usual Swiss-system, meaning that from the very beginning of the tournament I was paired against decent opposition rating-wise.
The average rating of my opponents turned out to be 2291, which is pretty good, but at the same time, it could have been higher, as I didn't get paired against some of the big fish in field such as GM Eltaj Safarli (2618).
In fact, I didn't have a single higher-rated opponent (which could be called lucky or unlucky, depending on your perspective, or you could just call it 'unlikely', a pleasantly objective and truthful descriptor).
Still, scoring 7 points is something I'm definitely proud of, as I've had some trouble in the past scoring wins opponents of similar strength or that are slightly weaker on paper.

In the end, there was a five-way tie at 7/9, in which I had the worst Buchholz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchholz_system), so I ended up 5th.
That was a bit unlucky, since those couple of Buchholz points meant a difference of 1200€ in prize money (and 5th place got 1/5 the prize money awarded for 1st, so it's a significant difference in relative, not just absolute terms).
At the same time, most of my co-seven-point-achievers did have higher rating performances, so the final ranking makes some sense.
[in my opinion, in relatively big open tournaments like this one, play-offs are the ideal solution to determine the final ranking among the highest scorers, but I can understand why most organisers don't want to deal with all that]

What went well, what didn't

Just as it is helpful to look for positives after a bad tournament, one should analyse what could have went better after a good result. The latter is perhaps even more important if long-term improvement is the goal.
Still, let's start with what went well, because why not.

• I was well-prepared with the White pieces. I chose what felt like the right openings and variations against my opponents, ending up in pleasant and/or slightly better positions, mostly without much risk, which is a plus.
  Of course, as I mentioned last week, some luck is always involved in the opening stage, but I worked quite hard preparing for the games, sometimes deep into the night (this is not ideal per se of course, but I guess the ambition behind it good).
• Many of the games were far from perfect, but when a clear winning opportunity presented itself, I mostly took advantage of it ('clutch' decisions, as they say, right?).

So, what could have gone better?

• With Black, I struggled quite a bit in the opening. In part, the reason for this was simply that I happened to have my Black games in the second round of the day, leaving me with very little time to prepare.
  But a serious chess player should have a reliable, ready-to-play repertoire with the Black pieces in order not to have to rely on specific preparation and to not get caught off-guard that easily.
  Having to try and recall random lines analysed years ago is not fun either, especially when failing to do so.
• The same is true, even if to a lesser extent, for my White games.
  While in this case, I'm happy about the quality of the prep and the discipline learning the variations, one shouldn't have to create entire opening files during the tournament, which I had to do a couple of times.
  The goal has to be to have an extensive repertoire ready (ideally having learnt the main lines of the main openings previously by revising them on a regular basis), such that before the round, all there is to do is to choose what to play, revise a little bit, and maybe explore some of the resulting positions with an Engine to stock up on some of the typical ideas and motives.
  Several hours of additional daily prep on top of the 7-8 hours of chess is clearly not best practice. It 'worked' this time, but most likely despite of it and not because of it.
• While I didn't get punished for it this time, my time management could be better (even though I do think some improvements are being made in this regard).
  I still spend too much time being insecure about my calculation and quadruple-checking the simplest variations. At the same time, there were a couple of instances where spending that extra time was important to make the right decision (and it's far from trivial determining whether or not any given decision could be crucial to the course of the game or not).

Instead of showing all the games, I'll just share one of my favourite moves of the tournament. It's not incredibly difficult, but an important one and played with little time on the clock, so I'm quite proud of it.

I'll conclude this with a few thoughts on this tournament performance in the context of reaching the defined goal.
Currently, I still consider this an 'unusually good' result. If I want to continue making progress though, this sort of performance has to become the norm. In order to get to 2500, one has to consistently perform like a 2500+ player.
I am reasonably optimistic though, since I've done only a week of training since starting this challenge. If this is my current form, should it not be possible to play considerably better in the future, after for example a couple of months of effective and consistent training? Maybe this is wishful thinking, but some healthy optimism is probably not a bad thing when trying to achieve an ambitious goal. Ok, I better stop the drivel now.

What's next

My next tournament is going to be the NordWest-Cup, Jan. 26.-29., a pretty strong 7-rounder (http://www.chessorg.de/nwcup.php?lang=en).

Until then, that is for the next two weeks, I'll reduce my time spent on chess to regular training, as I have to catch up on some non-chess-related matters.

Next week, my plan is to do the following daily routine:

• 2x 20 min. Tactics on ChessTempo (Blitz, Medium)
• 20 min. of blind tactics on listudy
• 4 Blitz games (3+2)

And over the course of the week, I'll do:

• 4x 50 min. of puzzles here on Lichess
• 6x 50 min. of working on openings (I'll have to focus on this in order to be ready for the tournament at the end of the month)

As for the opening part, I intend to exclusively work on building and compiling my opening files this coming week, and start learning the most relevant material the following week.

As always, thanks for reading. Let me know if you have any feedback (be it positive or negative) or any suggestions.
Have a good one. Cheers!