2023 Winter Open

This past weekend I played in the Winter Open put on by the Minnesota State Chess Association. Going in to the tournament I was not very optimistic. I ended 2022 with a section win and a new peak rating (1591) in November but my start to 2023 was going poorly (including literally forgetting how the pieces move at a crucial point in a game). I decided I needed to get organized.

Identify Problems

Thinking through my past weekend tournaments I identified a few things that had cause me problems:

  1. Finding myself rushed in the morning and missing breakfast
  2. Mental exhaustion after a long day of games on Saturday leading to collapse on the second day
  3. Getting too wrapped up in results and letting mistakes throw me off my game

Get Organized

  • Logistics: I spent some time a couple days before the tournament to plan out the logistics. Working backwards from the start times I made a plan for when to wake up, what to have for breakfast, when to leave, etc. I made a grocery list and filled my chess bag with healthy snacks.
  • Mental game: What I love most about chess is the puzzle nature of positions and how every game ends up taking a different path. Sometimes in tournament play I can get caught in a negative mental spot (exemplified by thoughts like “why can’t I beat this person”, “how did I miss that move”, etc.). To combat that I resolved to adopt a attitude of curiosity and discovery.
  • Down time: I packed headphones so I could listen to music in down time between rounds. Honestly, I don’t know why I’d never thought of this before for local tournaments.

Tournament Report

First round (0/0): I get the black pieces against a lower rated player who I’d played once previously. He launched an attack, which I was able to defend. I ended up sacrificing a pawn to force trading off some material and leaving us each with a pair of rooks, a minor piece, and several pawns. My rooks were more active and he resigned a move away from checkmate.

Second round (1/1): I get the white pieces against a provisionally rated opponent (1199P8, defeated a 1600 in the first round). I try to play my game but the position gets messy and he pulls out some nice tactics to win a two pawns. We end up in an endgame each with a queen and a rook. One of his two extra pawns is a central passer. We maneuver and end up repeating a position. After the repetition I offer a draw which he (understandably) declines. I manage to capture two of his pawns for one of mine and build a fortress with my king, rook, and remaining pawns in the corner of the board. Since I already offered the draw I was hesitant to offer again and we played another 20 moves or so before drawing by threefold repetition.

Third round (1.5/2): My first two games have taken about 6.5 hours, there’s less than an hour until the third round starts, and my brain is fried. I went to the tournament director and asked if I could still request a half point bye for round 3. He gave it to me since the next round hadn’t been paired yet.

Fourth round (2/3): I get the black pieces against a 1400 player who I’ve faced twice before (two draws). I make a game-time decision to mix up my opening taking us into new (to me) territory. Things get complicated, he sacrifices a rook for a pawn, we trade off a bunch of pieces and end up in a rook vs rook and pawn endgame. I try to find some tricks but we end up exchanging down to the kings and end in a draw.

Feeling good about the tournament (though expecting to lose a few rating points since all of my opponents were lower-rated). Looking at the standings I see that my second round opponent is in clear second and playing for the section win in the final round.

Fifth (last) round (2.5/4): I have the white pieces against a high 1400 player. We’re both at the board early and chat for 5-10 minutes. Again I try to play my game but end up in a messy, unclear middlegame. I push my queenside pawns trying to open something up while he loads up an attack on my kingside. I don’t see a way for his attack to work (but there are a lot of variations and I’m not sure I’ve calculated correctly) so I keep going with my plan. His attack starts with sacrificing a piece for a pawn and after additional exchanges I’m up basically a full rook. He resigns at mate-in-one.

Final result: 3.5/5, +15 rating points, 11+ hours of chess, no losses, and I rescued a draw against the section winner (who added 279 rating points going 4.5/5 games).

Conclusion

Overall I was pretty happy with how things went and I think the extra planning payed off. My next tournament is coming up in a few weeks and I’m planning to look through my games to identify some more chess-oriented things to try for that one.

Non Fungible Jokes

I made a joke on twitter the other day about NFTs and Keats and a friend asked for a translation. I went for a walk and thought about it and realized I had more thoughts than fit in a tweet so here we are.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as I understand them are digital artifacts that point or refer to something else (a work of art, potentially a concept). Similarly, there’s a way of thinking about language where words are arbitrary “tokens” that refer or point to the actual things we’re talking about.

Poetry, and especially metaphor, mess with the literal version of this way of thinking about language because it uses language in intentionally ambiguous ways. One example of this is Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” which concludes:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

from John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn“

There are several literary theoretical approaches that have tried to adopt the systematic rigor of mathematics and apply it to the study of literature and human society. I associate this sort of thinking to the varieties of techno-utopianism we see from time to time (e.g., we’re gonna build a city with blockchain!)

Opposed to that impulse is one that says we can never arrive at an all-encompassing system and will always have to make due with incomplete and uncertain systems (and maybe that’s a good thing). Going back to Keats, he wrote in a letter to his brothers about “Negative Capability” which he described as being “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” and

Suggested listening: Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins

De Rerum Natura

“As hounds that range the hills often smell out the lairs of wild beasts screened in thickets, when once they have got on the right trail, so in such questions one thing will lead on to another, till you can succeed by yourself in tracking down the truth to its lurking places and dragging it forth.”

Lucretius tr. Ronald Latham

Vampire Weekend

I’m sitting around gradually recovering from the flu and listening to new songs from Vampire Weekend. One of the songs, Harmony Hall, “interpolates” (as the word apparently is) a song from their previous album.

It’s a different world now. I remember discovering Vampire Weekend via a blog post on Caleb Crain’s blog “Steamboats are Ruining Everything”. Plenty of folks have eulogized the death of the blogging culture of the early 2000s so whatever. But there was something cool about finding those nooks and crannies of the internet. Not the big-name stuff but the back corners where folks wrote with varying levels of pretension about things they actually knew about and there wasn’t really any money in it.

The thing I miss the most, and it’s impossible to tell whether this was a factor of the era or a being-in-your-20s thing, was how much there was to discover in the world. Not just on the internet but corners of history, literature, etc. not covered in school.

Anyhow:

From Cosmicomics

“…And on top of that, we were always bumping against the Z’zu family’s household goods: camp beds, mattresses, baskets; these Z’zus, if you weren’t careful, with the excuse that they were a large family, would begin to act as if they were the only ones in the world: they even wanted to hang lines across our point to dry their washing.

“But the others also had wronged the Z’zus, to begin with, by calling them ‘immigrants,’ on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z’zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice–that seems obvious to me–because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of ‘immigrant’ could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

“It was what you might call a narrow-minded attitude, our outlook at that time, very petty. The fault of the environment in which we had been reared. An attitude that, basically, has remained in all of us, mind you: it keeps cropping up even today, if two of us happen to meet–at the bus stop, in a movie house, at an international dentists’ convention–and start reminiscing about the old days….”

from “All at One Point” in Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver)

Bombadil

Several years ago some sort of recommendation from Spotify introduced me to the band Bombadil out of North Carolina. I’ve been listening to them off and on ever since and finally, last Sunday, I had the chance to see them play live at 7th Street Entry.

Turns out, they’re really good live.