I played in my first serious tournament for the last 3 years, the Rochester Open 2017. I played very poorly. My visualization and analysis skills were very rusty.
Visualization and analysis are complementary and intertwined skills. The ability to visualize the position while evaluating the position and exploring move choices is critical. I misplaced pieces and missed obvious moves.
I wasted time repeating analysis of the move tree. I was having trouble keeping track of the position evaluation of a move sequence.
My opening knowledge was rusty, but not really much of a problem. Usually, your opponent (or you) will diverge from your preparation fairly early, and my games in this tournament were not really much different.
What to do?
I have not been doing tactics problems. These are really good visualization and analysis exercises. I will need to a lot of time on tactics problems.
I need to play more, but time controls long enough that there is some real analysis going on. G/15 is a reasonable time control and fairly common on the internet. Spend more time analyzing the game than playing. This will give a refresh of opening knowledge, as well as evaluating how my visualization and analysis is shaping up.
In a few weeks, I am going to play in the US Senior Open in Northfield MN as well as go to the chess camp the week before at St Olaf college. I hope to have some better form then.
LiChess.org tactics rating 2011, G15/3 rating 1848
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