Declined draw offers in Lahti

(Skip the) preamble

Some friends were going to a FIDE rated tournament and asked me to tag along. Sure, why not — for once, I'm sleeping relatively close to how an actual human does, and have been having good results in recent training games.

My previous OTB games have been "not great" — out of six games I've scored a grand total of 1.5(!) points and a provisional rating of 1469: meaning that I, like every chess player ever in their opinion, was quite a bit underrated.

The morning of...

I wake up at some stupendously early hour, gather my things and get picked up by Tuukka, along with Risto and Eemi. The car ride is spent mostly on playing Chessle, discussing various junior players' manerisms, and grinding Chessable for a small switch of repertoire I'm working on.

Having failed a Chessle on some stupid sideline of the Bird, we arrive at the tournament. Along with Tuukka, I'm placed in group C — fine, it's where my previous performance has put me, though I kind of hate playing in groups where anything but a full score is already a bit of a failure.

Risto just barely ends up in group B — a good thing, too, since we've played around 5663 OTB games, and don't really need game number 5664. Eemi has the intense misfortunte of being the second-to-last in group A, with a bunch of 2000-ish and three titled players. But hey, good practice!

Game 1

The first round starts, and I'm a nervous wreck (as usual). Calculation feels impossible, and I spend most my time staring at the board waiting for brilliant ideas to magic themselves into my head. Somehow the game proceeds nicely for me, despite a couple of moderate hiccups.

Notably, my opponent (1586) is quite optimistic about his chances to play for a win far into the game in the post-portem, probably due to my low listed rating.

Risto won his game with the black pieces against a talented junior in great style, sacrificing a piece for an attack in the Catalan. Tuukka and Eemi had no such luck, but hey, at least we're 50% as a carpool.

Game 2

My opponent is an older gentleman, formerly around 1800(!) strength and now 1443. Such players can sometimes "randomly" play a very strong game. This one, though, goes fairly smoothly. aside from a small tactical gaffe that ends up working out for me anyhow. In patented "grandpa chess" style, we trade off pieces very quickly and go into an endgame, fortunately me being a pawn up. I have the chance for a Shirovian ...Nh4??!!, but as a well-known coward, I instead opt for the obvious and boring ...Nxf4 (which actually works, unlike ...Nh4) and win from there.

The others repeat their first-round results as well, maintaining our solid carpool 50%.

Lotsa food, little sleep

After some misadvantures (no passable tofu at the supermarket in 2024!?), we get to our lodging and, while the others analyze, I cook us some pasta (and intermittently poke in to scream at Tuukka for playing Delayed Alapin), causing only two (2) smoke alarms. The food is, of course, excellent, and we go to sleep.

...well, I'm meant to go to sleep. Suddenly, somewhere around midnight and already in bed, I have the epiphany of a lifetime: I can type my opponent's name followed by "chess" into DuckDuckGo! Lo and behold, he has a Chess.com profile, and I see that he 1: is probably somewhat underrated OTB, being over 2100 rapid on Chess.com, and 2: plays the Schliemann semi-exclusively. At this point it's too late to really do serious prep, so I focus on trying to sleep and/or stressing about my previous bad record against Schliemann.

(Un)fortunately, I wake up after around five hours of sleep, and now have some time to devour the rest of the food before the others wake up and refresh my memory on the theory. Generally, cramming computer theory down your cranium an hour before the game, especially while sleep deprived, ends with you making strange moves and losing very quickly, and the benefits of my theory session are dubious at best.

Game 3

My opponent (rated 1628) indeed goes for the Schliemann, and I get to put Bc4!? on the board, after which I'm on my own.

We end up exchanging pieces off very quickly and end up in a RRNvRRB endgame. I felt pretty good about my position, even if the engine seems to give White only a symbolic advantage, and after a couple more moves my knight starts looking very good compared to the bishop, and after an exhausting grind of a game, I get a full point for my troubles. My opponent later asked if I'm Numerot on Lichess, apparently having googled me after the game after I didn't play like a 1463.

The downside is that the game lasts for 58 moves and quite a few hours, and I'm completely spent at the end. I find Risto in a nearby Burger King, devour two (hopefully) vegan burgers, grab some bananas from a Lidl on the way and head back for game 4, wondering if I should play my new repertoire versus 1.d4 or play hardcore for a draw in QGA like a coward.

Game 4

Yeah, I went for QGA. A draw would guarantee a win in group C (and 80€!), and I haven't really gotten used to my new repertoire.

At some point during the game, I start feeling physically unwell, the dubious sleep quality and living off of garbage — exclusively bananas, protein bars, Subway and Burger King — for the last 30 or so hours catching up to me. The endgame looks to simplify into a relatively simple draw, but I end up donating my opponent the full point, leading to a +3-1=0 finish. Well, no excuses, I could have played better!

On the ride back gome, the front-seaters theorize about a business model of selling gasoline (which, apparently, has something to do with demand; I wasn't really listening as much as clowning on them whenever able to). In the backseat, we play low-quality speed chess on Lichess, four classical games obviously not being enough chess for the weekend.

In conclusion...

Fun trip with a bittersweet finish. Losing the final game is a bit annoying, of course, but I place second in the group with a performance rating in the high 1700s, which feels about right based on my results in training games. It's also good to finally just to prove to myself I'm able to play some reasonable slow games. The main takeaways are probably that I should learn to sleep better, though that's been more or less obvious for the last 17-ish years.

Thanks for reading!
-Numerot