Road to NM: Week 7 -- From Underdog to Favorite

Intro

Welcome back to week 7 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's OTB play was a 4 round scholastic swiss in my hometown, I was entering as the 2 seed overall, behind someone rated 1560, but he withdrew and became an assistant TD before the tournament, so instead of last week where I was the 4 seed in my quad, I was the top overall seed. I still figured i'd have a good chance to gain rating, as there were 2 people rated 1400+, and a 1370 too, unfortunately with the way pairings shook out, I didn't have the opportunity to play either of the 1400s.

Round 1 the game was wild from the beginning, as I played a very sharp variation of the potter variation of the scotch as white, and emerged better pretty early on, and played a couple of nice moves, before getting into a completely winning endgame and converting well before my opponent flagged.

Round 2, I played well through the first part of the opening, and then I played a horrible move for no reason and was worse, but we transposed into an equal endgame (which is my strength) and my opponent just hung a pawn for no reason and I converted pretty much flawlessly.

Round 3 was my highest rated opponent of the day, against a 1370 (still lower rated than I had wanted but whatever) we got a closed Sicilian where I again played inaccurately on the back half of the opening and got into a worse position, but my opponent retreated back and I was pressing for the win the whole game and eventually got a crushing attack because my opponent was just shuffling pieces because of their serious time pressure before they flagged, my second opponent to do so in the tournament.

Round 4 was not great, I blitzed my moves out against the London and came up with an exchange sacrifice that clearly didn't work but I didn't notice that until immediately after I played the move. Fortunately for me I managed to create enough counterplay to get a better position and eventually trap my opponent's queen and then win the game.

Overall I still won the tournament with 4/4, and my brother actually won the under 400 section in his first ever tournament so congrats to him for that, though with the low rated pairings i only gained a measly 23 rating points, but I took what I could get and took care of business even if it was a bit shaky and against lower rated players.

Study

Studying this week again consisted of almost exclusively game analysis again, as i've still been busy with school, and the time i've had to dedicate has mostly gone towards what I believe is the most important aspect of my improvement study, which is game analysis. I also did spend a decent amount of time studying tactics this week, and I did play a couple games online, but the majority of my time was tactics and game analysis, which I believe is the most productive way to study, hopefully this next week i'll have plenty of time to do more practice.

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)
I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you guys next week with the results from this week's OTB, which is a 5 round dual-rated swiss where I will definitely not be the 1 seed thankfully (at least from the current signups I've looked at) I'll see you then, bye!