Road to NM -- Week 11: Playing a Viewer OTB?!?!

Intro

Welcome back for week 11 on the Road to NM series where I account my progress on the road towards the NM title (hopefully) by the end of the 2027-2028 school year (May 2028). In this blog I analyze my tournament games from the week if I had any and outline my thought process so all can see what I'm thinking in each game and giving all of you guys the chance to walk along side me on my route to the NM title. Feel free to say any comments you have about either my games, study plans, or just general advice or thoughts about the blog in general. Also, if you've been keeping up with the series you probably have seen that there is a different famous chess player as the cover each week either from history or current. If you want to help decide the person on the cover, comment the player you would like to be the cover photo (it must be someone who hasn't been featured yet) and the most commented player/comment of a suggested player that is most liked in the forum (ex. if someone posts Magnus Carlsen and it gets 6 likes but 3 people post Pragg, Magnus would be featured *if he hadn't been the cover yet*) Also, likes do not add up over multiple comments to keep from people stacking on comments with each other to win the featured player each week. So anyways, let's get into all the stuff that happened this week.

OTB Play

This week was a great experience because I finally got out of the tournaments against only weaker competition and got some games against other strong opponents since it was a quads tournament. A really cool experience that made me so happy and surprised as to how well-liked my blogs actually are was that before the actual quads started, I was the 2nd seed overall (which meant i was in quad 1) but the 1 seed came up to me (who was over 200 points higher rated than me) and asked me if I was the person who wrote the Road to NM Lichess blogs because he recognized my name on the signup list. This was so crazy to hear (because this person wasn't local, shout-out to them if they're reading this blog!) which literally means the only place he knew and recognized from me is these blogs. So, if you ever play me in a tournament and want a complete shout-out with your name, please let me know and I'd be happy to shout you out (I didn't want to shout-out this person's name because I wasn't sure how they felt about it) but anyways, let me get past my rambling and into the actual games from this week.

Round 1

As the 2 seed, naturally I played the 3 seed in round 1. The quads didn't have the best turnout again because I didn't realize that there was literally a championship for the big university in my town going on that day and most stronger players were at that so my first opponent was a decent amount lower rated than me at around 1414 I think it was (a 137 point gap) I had a really strong game in the closed Sicilian as white, managed to get him to make a mistake in time pressure, and found a really nice queen sacrifice to get a winning position. I had been playing really well the entire game, until I made an awful 200 elo blunder completely hanging a rook because I thought it was a brilliant sacrifice. I apologize in advance for the revulsion lots of you are going to experience from this awful move, it was truly awful. Fortunately my opponent had 6 seconds on his clock (there was a 5 second delay in this 50+5 quad) and since the position was still very complicated and he had almost no time, I still managed to sneak out the win thankfully.

Round 2

This was my cleanest game of the tournament. I was playing an older gentleman who was 1650+ a while back but now he was rated 1400 heading into this tournament, so his strength has dropped a little bit. He played the English versus me, and my neo-grunfeld setup confused him and I got a massive spacial advantage early and was able to completely dismantle his cramped position and win the game pretty handily.

Round 3

This was my game against the opponent who told me he had seen my blogs (still crazy to me) and while I wanted to do my best, I got out of opening prep early, and got completely dismantled positionally. I thought I had found a way to save the game with a rook sacrifice at one point, but I missed the ending line to the sequence that won my opponent a piece, and from there he converted cleanly and smoothly. A nice game from him, but I should have been better positionally.

Overall, it was a decent performance, it was my expected result, but I do wish I could have played better in round 3. In the first 2 rounds though, I think I played pretty good outside of my awful rook hang, which is what I wanted to do. I gained 14 rating from the tournament, putting me at 1568, which is reasonable considering i went 2/3 all against opponents where I was expected to win or lose and that was the result I got.

Online Play

I played a decent amount more online this week, pretty much exclusively rapid, with a little blitz and bullet to test new opening prep and played really well, gaining a solid 30 rating points only playing about 4 or 5 games (my rating deviation was higher having not played for a little while) One of my games I really enjoyed how I played because I typically struggle with slower, more positional games but this game I think I played extremely well positionally and outplayed my opponent from start to finish.

Study

With football (soccer) season starting back up I haven't had as much time for my more unique studying, but I actually did do a decent amount of studying this week, mostly my usual game analysis and tactics training (as I believe at my level those are easily the most important things for my improvement) along with a little opening work and a decent amount of time playing online and watching the Olympiad. The Olympiad was a good thing to watch for me because I got to see some more of how grandmasters play and how much thought and purpose needs to go into each one of my moves to be playing great chess. It also helped make my love for the game stronger because of how beautiful some of the games were. Otherwise, I didn't do much else studying but I do think it was a productive week.

Outro

Thanks so much for tuning into the Road to NM series, if you enjoyed it please give it a like so more people can see it and if you don't want to miss out on new additions to the series be sure to follow me so you get updated when a new one is released (I'm not follow farming, it has no benefit for me and I can't even see my total follower count)

There won't be any classical tournament to recap next week, as I don't think i'll be playing in one until the 17th of October. Though I will still have plenty of online games to show you hopefully, and some OTB rapid games (including a really funny one that i'll hopefully be able to include). Thanks so much again for reading, and I hope to see you next week.