Amazing performance with lessons for a lifetime

Tournament Analysis

The tournament consisted of a standard category and a blitz category. I did decent in the standard and amazing in the blitz. I didn't finish either of the categories undefeated, but I enjoyed both of them. As I said before on my Twitter, my mentality during this tournament was very close to its peak, especially during the blitz event. I am very happy about this tournament not only because I gained more than 40 rating points in the blitz event, but also because of the lessons I learned by being myself during this event. I was walking my talk, I was using the algorithm effectively, and I had a good mentality. Compared to my disastrous last tournament, this one was certainly a relief for me, my parents and fans (and coach(es)). Now I will tell you about the training that went into this tournament and the lessons I learned.

Training

• Puzzle Storm - This is one of my favourite training methods, especially when training for blitz events. It helps me improve my intuition, calculation speed and practical decision-making.
• Playing against Stockfish - As I said in one of my Twitter posts, I played a few games against Stockfish to train for some of the unusual openings I have known. This wasn't just for fun. I did play the Orangutan (1.b4!?) in the classical event against a few strong players and had great success. Not only the opening but playing against Stockfish helped me immensely in improving my calculations.

Apart from the above-mentioned methods, I couldn't train that hard for this tournament as I was busy with the other things I had to do. Maybe this is what caused my slightly off performance in the classical. Although it was still decent, I felt like I could have done more. You will understand what I mean when you read the lessons.

Lessons

• When using the IAA, a position's complexity (the difficulty to evaluate) is relative to each player and is always directly proportional to the amount of calculation required to assess a position.
• When using the IAA, if you see a line which leads to a slightly better position for you in 5 minutes, don't look further even if you feel like there should be something better.
• When you are entering the time trouble phase, your time becomes directly proportional to the depth of your search tree while it becomes inversely proportional to the breadth of your search.
• Caro-Kann is not an opening I can use at my level anymore. Whether I like it or not, I have to switch to the main lines.

As you see, many of these lessons were on the Intuition-based Averaging Algorithm, specifically about managing time when using it. If you are an enthusiastic reader and have read all my articles, you must know that I realized this mistake before my event. But as I got busy, I didn't have time to find a solution to it. But now I have a couple of free days before my next event to find a solution.
Lessons like the last one mentioned can only be gained through experience, so I don't think I should be that hard on myself for missing it.

Changes I will make

• Doing more "guess-the-move" training - This training method I talked about had somehow missed my radar for the past couple of days. This is an effective training method and I will be using it more frequently from now on.
• Finding a solution to the time management problem with the IAA - With the new lessons I have learned from my tournament, this shouldn't be impossible and I now feel closer to finding a solution.
• Analyzing the difference between how I play against the players of my level and how the best players in the world play against the players of my level - This is not something that I have done before, but it will surely be interesting to see how higher levelled players make it look so easy when they are up against someone much lower-rated but still pretty good. When studying this difference, I think it'll be more insightful to study the games with a conceptual perspective to appoint principles of function to my algorithm rather than just train the IAA to find exact moves.
• Learning more main lines - I had a great time with the Caro-Kann. It'll always be one of my favourite openings, but at my level with the players knowing the most critical lines, it's best to go for the lines that have been deeply studied to be playable for both sides.

That's it for this article, I hope you enjoyed it and learned something from it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and if you have any suggestions on how I can improve my blog posts, feel free to share them with me.

External links

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@felew699
Twitter: https://x.com/felew699
Against Stockfish: https://lichess.org/study/2guM490P
Club of Believers: https://lichess.org/team/the-club-of-believers
Opening Study: https://lichess.org/study/cKyW7Mmz
Algorithm (IAA) explanation: https://lichess.org/@/felew699/blog/future-of-my-algorithms/DIRkWzKO

Special Thanks to...

Grammar Editor: https://app.grammarly.com/