Road to IM | Day 1

I decided to start this series today because I just played the first day of my first-ever IM norm tournament! If you're not familiar with what an "IM norm" is, it’s essentially one of the key requirements for earning the International Master (IM) title. To become an IM, you need to achieve three IM norms and reach a FIDE rating of 2400 at some point.

An IM norm is earned by delivering a strong performance in a tournament, more specifically a performance rating of at least 2450. There are additional conditions as well: your opponents must meet certain average rating standards, and you must play a required number of titled players (like other IMs, or even GMs).

An IM norm tournament is typically a 10-player round-robin, where everyone plays everyone else once. The organizers select the participants carefully to ensure players have the chance to earn norms if they perform at a certain level.
This particular tournament is on the weaker side, which means I’ll need to score higher than usual to meet the norm requirements. Based on what I've heard, I’ll need at least 7 out of 9 points to earn the IM norm here.

In the first round, I faced FM Joar Ölund, another Swedish FIDE Master. He has previously been rated over 2400, already holds one IM norm, and is currently chasing his second.
He had the White pieces, and I was expecting the London System, and indeed, he played it!

I didn’t mind this opening choice, as I would have been happy with a draw, playing Black against a higher-rated opponent.

The game started like this:

After the game, he said he cooked up this surprise last minute on the train. Lucky for me, it wasn’t exactly potent.

This was my first slight mistake. I was trying to stop White from playing Rb3–b6... but the move I played didn’t stop it at all! Luckily, he missed it too and instead went for a queen endgame, where he still had an edge.

"This was a real facepalm moment. I tried to shut down the b-file, but 26. Qc3! (threatening c5–c6) would have busted me wide open. I’d be stuck blocking with my queen, basically rolling out a red carpet for White to the b-file. Thankfully, my opponent didn’t spot it and gave me a much-needed second chance.

In the second round, I was paired against CM Melvin Ral Lustig, a rising Swedish talent around 13–14 years old with a 2237 rating. I’ve played him a few times before and noticed he has a very 'computer-ish' style — not that he plays perfectly, but he doesn’t really stick to traditional principles and tends to think more concretely. I also knew he would be well-prepared against me. In fact, in his round 1 game, he got a winning position just a few moves in thanks to his prep. So, I started with 1. b3 to throw him off and avoid any preparation.

A very unorthodox move, but one of the engines preferred lines.

Here he finally made a slight mistake. The idea is to break with e5-e4 but I can simply defend it with Ncd2.

This was such a stupid mistake. My plan was to play Qc2–b2 next, putting pressure on e5 and preparing b3–b4. The only problem? I completely overlooked the obvious Nc6–d4.

Here I took a draw, but apparently I could have sacrificed a pawn and ended up with a better position!

Here I completely missed Bc3, which actually defends the d6-pawn tactically with Bc3–b4 ideas. I just thought I had to run back to b2, but then Black goes Rc8–c6 and grabs the c6-pawn.

Tomorrow I’m playing the strongest player in the tournament, Hampus Sörensen, with the black pieces. Honestly, I’d be happy with a draw, but we’ll see what happens. He's been struggling so far, only scoring 0.5/2 against much lower-rated opponents. Hopefully, I can also manage to get a result against him.