In the short time that I have been playing chess, I have been wanting to play in a tournament. I don’t really know why, except that I like to go all the way when I do things. I have also wanted a rating, and tournaments can be a way to get one.
It’s pretty silly for a beginner to want a rating, of course, because any rating at this stage will be very low and thus likely discouraging. Still, a rating can be a way to measure your progress.
Besides, given my interest in women and chess, I couldn’t resist when I saw that the Chesskid USA Girls and Women’s Chess Championship 2022 was being held online on April 16. I didn’t expect to win any games, but the early bird registration fee was low, and so I signed up. I was happy to learn that there would be a “warmup” one week before the tournament. Perfect, I thought. The tournament itself might be brutal–my teacher did not contradict me when I said that I had no expectation of winning and said that she had lost all her games in her first tournament –but a warmup seemed unintimidating. Until I signed in and found out that it consisted of six games timed at five minutes each!
I will set aside the topic of speed chess vs. classical (slow) chess as one that could occupy several blog posts, but suffice it to say that the fastest game I had played up to that point was ten minutes. I played those six five-minute games and lost them all. One thing I learned from them is that five minutes is not zero minutes, even though it sounds like that to the inexperienced. Some kind of chess could be played; checkmates could result. Thus I went into the tournament proper with a feeling of relief that the games would be a leisurely fifteen minutes.
As the tournament was about to begin, I saw that the women’s division had only 12 participants; (happily, there were ten times as many playing in the girls’ divisions). I was very nervous during the first game, partly because my opponent made her moves quickly, but I calmed down after that and had one or two moments when I thought I was playing well, until I was checkmated from an unexpected direction. As expected, I lost all of my games. But when the tournament ended, I didn’t feel too bad, even when I saw the screen with rankings and ratings showing me in 12th place with a rating of 100, the lowest possible. I had played six chess games in a row, something that I hadn’t thought my brain was even capable of doing. The tournament was streamed, which gave me a kind of rock star feeling, and even though the girls’ games received most of the coverage, my poor husband watched all three hours and twenty-two minutes. He said that when one of my games showed up, the 12-year-old commentator, Alice Lee (a FIDE Master and Woman International Master), observed that my position was weak. Afterward, I reviewed a computer analysis of the games and found that all six games were not one continuous blunder, as it had seemed in my memory. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each of my games had been lost in its own way.
Recommendation of the Week: For the second week in a row, I want to cite an episode of Daniel Lona’s Chess Experience podcast. This time it is his interview of FIDE Master and founder of the Charlotte Chess Center Peter Giannatos, on the topic of “The Common Mistakes Made by Adult Improvers (and How to Fix Them).” Several times I felt that Peter was talking directly to me. Check it out; maybe you will feel that way, too.
