Pan Ams Prep #1
Hi everyone, and welcome back to my blog! 
I am excited to be back, and I missed you all! I appreciate the questions and concerns about my blog, where I've been, etc. Unfortunately, I don't have a concrete answer. Other than that I was busy (no kidding) and honestly out of ideas. I took time off OTB chess because I wanted to wait until I was truly ready and motivated to play, so I didn't really have many competitive games to write about.
Let me tell you about this tournament I'm prepping for. The Pan-American Collegiate Team Championship (Pan Ams for short) is (I believe) the largest OTB collegiate chess tournament in the nation. Maybe even the world? Not quite sure; someone would have to fact-check me on that. It's a huge opportunity, as the top four teams go to the collegiate championship tournament (final 4 thingy, whatever it is... as you can tell, I'm not in the know as to how the collegiate champion is determined ).
Anyway, I wrote about it last year. Last year was crazy. We got the "invite" literally a month before the event started, so we scrambled to try and prepare, work out logistics, etc. In the end, we brought one team (four players), and while we didn't do great in my opinion, it was a valuable experience for all of us. I got to play multiple titled players, including my first IM OTB.
This year should be different. We've been planning 2023 Pan Ams since the conclusion of Pan Ams 2022. I will say that I was doubtful at times if I could participate this year. After a series of rough tournaments and hating tournament chess as a result, I mentally checked out of competitive chess, and I thought that forgoing my final opportunity (yes, I am a senior in college) would come with it. It was a difficult decision, but ultimately, I decided that it would be my last opportunity to represent Baylor competitively, and "why not." My only somewhat condition was that we worked something out with funding and credit to my team, we got on top of that.
This year, we're bringing nine players... two teams of four equal nine... haha, I'm bad at math! Nahh, we just decided to bring one extra player... you know... "just in case." The unfortunate thing is that if all nine of us go, someone will have to sit out each round, but I think it's better than someone getting sick or something and risking being short a player! I'll probably get more specifically into who our players are in a future post.
And now for the point of the post:
The preparation! To start... with little to no quality prep, I signed up for a small local tournament. There were four rounds, but I took a final-round bye. In round 1, I was paired with John DeVries (1200 USCF), and that game was... well... disappointing. For this post, I'm not going to dive deep into every single game and possibility, but I want to give a simple overview of how my games went.
Drawing a 1200 in round 1 is not ideal... but I knew I was rusty, and if I can go on a run, it'll be like nothing happened.
That sucked I learned that I needed to be more deliberate in calculations, as I needed to spend more time on Rxd7.
The pairings gods favored me, as I was paired vs. Darryl West (1769 USCF), so if I won, I could salvage some of my rating.
I lost exactly 30 points (deservedly so). 1776 to 1746. It was sad but not completely devastating. I realized that I need to work more on calculation if I'm going to succeed... especially at Pan Ams... where the time control is 90|30.
I've been using Chesstempo to try and sharpen my calculations. They force you to be more accurate than Chess.com, and in my opinion, emulate game situations better than other platforms. I'll show you a few puzzles I did recently. I got 3/4 correct from this bunch.
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Not bad! I feel like if I can continue working chesstempo and other calculation exercises, I should be in decent shape.
I'll be playing in an invitational tournament Saturday. It's a quad with me, 1800, 1900, and 2000. I'll try not to get destroyed. It'll be a double quad, so six rounds, G/30;d5. G/30 can be tricky with time pressure, so hopefully, I'll manage it well. My next post will likely be covering those games, and possibly other preparation techniques I'm trying.
Whew, it's honing in on 1 AM. Time to go to bed... uhh... I mean... look for your comments!
