How to prepare for a tournament - The Tournament Guide

1. Find out when the tournament is.

While this may seem silly, it's important to keep track of when your tournament starts! Let me tell you what happened to me a few months ago: I was just casually playing some blitz online when a reminder popped up. I opened it and I could not believe my eyes: I completely forgot that I was going to play a team championship with my club. Yeah. I kind a played bad. So, don't be as stupid as me and know your calendar well!

2. Set your Goals.

Your Expections should always match your preparation time.

If you just wanna play for fun, ok, you need little to no preparation time.

But if your goal is success, things should look very different:

I see a lot of players bragging how good they are and that nothing can stop them and so on, but as soon as the tournament starts they score not nearly as they said. Then they get upset and withdraw. If you want to get good results, that is basically the last thing to do.

Instead, we think clever and start to prepare maybe a week ago and don't play video games 24/7!
Make yourself a plan what you want to train and tick it off! That's very important becuase it motivates you to keep studying!

Then always remember the following formula for success:

Success = Study + Practice + Fix

3. Make yourself a plan.

A plan is a useful guideline for what you want to practice. It can look like this:

Monday: 30 min. of Tactic training.

Tuesday: Play 2 rapid games with analysis.

Wednesday: Study some endgames, maybe 1 hour.

Thursday: Pause

Friday: Get training in the club.

It is very important to not make the plan not too big, because you probably won't stick to it.

4. One day before the tournament.

One day before your tournament, it is important to stop the grind a take a break from chess to refresh your mind. This has helped me super well and hopefully many others. Do soemthing for your body and go take a walk or something. This is important, because otherwise you will get a burnout and play like this in the competion: My bad game.

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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this blog, good luck in your next tournament!

Until Next time, Dr_KaspEvil!!

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