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Category: chess tournaments

My Second OTB Tournament

My Second OTB Tournament

Published by Dawn on November 13, 2024

In early November, I went to an ALTO (At Least Twenty-One) tournament at the Charlotte Chess Center! The experience lived up to the positive things I had heard about the event (The tournament winner, Nate Solon, has a great post about it.) It was wonderful to be in a silent room in which more than one hundred adults were concentrating over chess boards that had been set up for them in advance, with the clocks all programmed as well. All three of my opponents (I took two byes) were lovely people who were willing to discuss the game afterward. I lost all three, alas. I had really hoped that I would win just one game: the friend with whom I traveled did, and it was his first tournament. Still, I feel I handled the inevitably difficult emotions well and stayed focused on the positives. 

Until the Saturday night social hour. An experience I had there was much more trying than losing all my games. A participant approached me, shook my hand vigorously, and while laughing thanked me for having the lowest rating of all of the participants, so that he didn’t have to be in that position. 

Chess improvers: Be kind to one another. Because, as they say, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. We all navigate the adult-chess-improver world trying or pretending not to care about our ratings, which we are able to do to a lesser or greater extent depending on our psychological makeup and what is going on in our lives. But making fun of someone you don’t even know with a lower rating than you is not ok. Those of us who weren’t born in a barn know this, but my experience shows that it needs to be said. Now I feel even more self-conscious about my rating, which was 101 going into the tournament (my online ratings indicate that this number should be higher). It’s hard not to feel that I have to win a game at the next one. I’m also worried because I’m having trouble letting go of this jaw-dropping incident, and I know that that just hurts me, not the perpetrator. I’m going to try to make writing about it here the last time I talk about it or think about it.

Chess improvers: Be kind to one another. Because, as they say, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. As it happened, I was widowed about ten days before the tournament. It was not a sudden passing, and I decided to make the long-planned trip to Charlotte with a supportive friend, hoping that it would provide some diversion from my intense sadness. As it did, for the most part. Chess is so absorbing that, even while anticipating the loss of my husband, I had hoped that it would eventually be a safe harbor amid the tumultuous waves of grief. I even joked that when I remarried, it would be to chess. At this early stage I can say that sometimes it has been that safe harbor, but my emotions have been interfering with my play and study (with everything, actually) more than I would like. I’m persisting, though, because I know that this rewarding pastime and its largely supportive community will help see me through. 

An Older Woman’s Chess Journey  is a proud affiliate of ChessGoals–if you use the link here to purchase from them and enter “dawn” as the coupon code, you will receive 30% off their courses, and I will receive a commission. Purchasing via an affiliate link doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust.

 

More Progress, Less Satisfaction

More Progress, Less Satisfaction

Published by Dawn on November 8, 2022

My rating continued to climb after my last post, going from the mid-300s to just over 500. Recently, though, I seem to be in a plateau around that half-thousand figure, and it’s frustrating. Why? Well, the first reason is due to a misconception of mine. As I’ve mentioned, I’m in the Chess Dojo training program, which is sensibly divided into rating ranges, with different assigned tasks for each range. I’m in the lowest, which is labeled 0-400. I was eagerly awaiting getting to 400 on one of the online chess platforms, chess.com. It would feel so good to “graduate” and not be in the lowliest cohort anymore. But I had neither read the fine print nor remembered that everything involving chess has to be complicated. There are a zillion different rating systems in chess. It is not like, say, batting average. Even chess.com and lichess.org, our main playing spaces, do not agree. My ~500 on chess.com is not greater than the 400 of Chess Dojo, which uses FIDE, the system of the International Chess Federation, admittedly a more legitimate standard to use. However, the fine print says that the 0-400 band covers ratings of up to 650 on chess.com.

I know, your eyes may be glazing over and you are thinking that this is too much obsessing about numbers. But the other drawback of a low rating is that it is a little lonely at the bottom. Although you can learn from facing opponents who have ratings significantly lower or higher than yours, and you should of course play them occasionally, the ideal chess opponent is someone near your level. It’s just the right degree of challenge, and both players have a chance of winning and gaining a few rating points. As I write this, there are about 65 people enrolled in the 0-400 band of the Chess Dojo training program, which has been hugely successful–more than its creators envisioned–recently attaining its 1,000th participant. But only 15 or so members of that lowest cohort have a chess.com rating below 600, like me. Why? Well, Chess Dojo lets you sign up for whatever cohort you want, and they provide such good training of the fundamentals of chess that people want to spend time at the lower levels to make sure their chess foundation is solid. That’s all good. But one of my hopes for the program was to find serious people around my rating to play with–instead of those wonderful random strangers I play online every day. 

Our rating band recently had a tournament. Only six people, or about 10 percent of the cohort, entered, and during the three-week period of the tournament, two of those “graduated” to the next level up. So I played one person at my rating level and two who were considerably higher. I finished last, with 0 wins. This sounds like I am blaming my poor performance on the rating differentials, but I am not. My teacher has said that I can defeat anyone–especially those with ratings up to 1,000–as long as I don’t blunder, and that has given me some wind under my wings. I went into the tournament games thinking that I could win any game, but in each case I eventually blundered. I did capitalize on a blunder made by the opponent at exactly my level, but not enough to win. The tournament was actually a great experience for me. These were the longest games I had ever played. Although the training program suggests that people in the 0-400 band play games no longer than 30 minutes per side, the tournament games were 90 minutes per side. One of my games lasted for 2 hours and 20 minutes! This is excellent training for over-the-board tournaments, which generally have long time controls. But I think my brain needs more practice before it can correctly calculate “if he takes this, and I take that, and he takes this, and I take that. . .” for more than an hour at a stretch. 

In any event, a new tournament for our band has been announced, and I will soldier on, no matter the ratings of the other entrants. If I defeat someone with a higher rating, I get more rating points, so maybe I will graduate one of these days. At least I know I’ll be playing with people who care enough about their chess improvement to pay to join a training program, and when schedules permit we meet online to do a post-mortem of the game and/or compare written analyses, essential pieces of any chess improvement plan.  

My First Tournament

My First Tournament

Published by Dawn on May 1, 2022

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.