Quick thoughts after my OTB game, new Coach, YouTube-video & Zwischenzug by FM Nate Solon

I have now been writing on Substack for over a year now. Substack offers many great features. One of the great features is the recommendation feature, where I can recommend other great writers on Substack. Last year 584 readers joined from FM Nate Solon’s Substack called Zwischenzug, so I know a good share of you know about his work. However, according to the stats, there is only an 18% overlap between our two publications.

Substack Audience stats

We are both a bit sus, as Nakamura would say, about the number being so low, but if true then we need to correct it. Nate writes excellent weekly articles about chess improvement. This week he published an interesting article on the Woodpecker Method. Besides being an FM he is also a data scientist, who likes to do a deep dive into chess-related data, so remember to follow his publication!

My round 1 game

As mentioned last week I have signed up for an OTB club tournament. This Tuesday I played the first-round game. I was both excited and a bit nervous about playing again. I did not feel well prepared even though I play and look at chess every day. It might be that it was because now it counted for something. I started to prepare and look up my opponent. A 2055 FIDE-rated player, who previously had a 2200 rating.

From the few games I could find it looked like he likes to shy away from complications and grind his opponents down. With White, he plays d4, and would most likely play a Catalan, so I looked into a line that would give an unbalanced position. I did my research and I got the position I had planned on the board. I restarted my YouTube channel so I could share with you what happened next…

Remember to follow my channel on YouTube. If you want to take a look at the full game to see how I was tortured for 58 moves you can find it here:

After this horrible return game, I have gotten in contact with an IM coach, who will help me moving forward.

After he looked at my most recent tournament games at our first lesson he pointed out that I had made several other opening mistakes and that it seems like my openings are my biggest weakness at the moment. He also pointed out that the 2000-players know their openings.

I did not expect that it was openings that were my problem, but it is true that I have not focused very much on openings compared to other areas of the game. The game has definitely been a lesson for me..

/Martin