Surviving a 35 000 player tournament | Daily Champs R1
Another year, another Daily Chess Champs! 2023 marks the fourth year in a row that I’ve entered the Chess.com Daily Chess Championship event, a chaotic 1-day/move tournament that begins with 22 simultaneous games on the 1st of January every year. The tournament has grown from approximately 16 000 players in 2020 (the first year I played) to 35 000 in 2022, and while timeouts are traditionally high, it’s still a fight to finish top of one’s 12-player group to advance to the next round.
Within two days, my number of ongoing games was down from 22 to 8. I wish I could say this was because I had speedily disposed of my opponents over the board, but alas, it was due to my opponents timing out (or seeing my 1.e4 and deciding they could never defeat someone who played such an amazing opening move!). While I was disappointed to have so few games remaining, I resolved to try my best in the remaining games, both to get some games to learn from and to get through to the 2nd round, something I haven’t managed to do since 2020.
Sadly, it wasn’t too much longer before my next opponent timed out in their two games – as white, I was about to win a pawn, while as black I was toying with the idea of a pawn storm on my opponent’s long-castled king. While I got a 100% accurate game as white, and 2 more points on the scoreboard, neither of these gave me much satisfaction, and I started to worry I might advance to the next round without getting any proper wins!
Fortunately my other opponents seemed to be staying on top of the 1-day time control, and things seemed to be going well for me – I got to practice some opening theory, and was finding some decent tactics in some of the games. My toughest games appeared to be against the second seed in my group, a player with a fourteen hundred rating, who was holding their own in one game and down a piece for a few pawns in a tricky position. Sadly, these games timed out too, after 10 moves per side! I then had only 4 games remaining, with not a single game that I felt I had deservedly won. As slight consolation, I was pleased to see that I’d achieved 99.6% accuracy with the white pieces over 10 moves, and that my opening tactics had been completely sound.
Unlike last year’s Daily Chess Champs, where I was the one blundering a queen, this year the first queen blunder came from my opponent – I missed the tactic initially, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise as my opponent grabbed a pawn and allowed me a nice mate in one (I managed to avoid being greedy by taking the queen instead of checkmating!).
Before the queen blunder, my opponent was already down material - they clearly hadn't watched the video I made last year about 'The tactic every chess player should know'! See if you can spot it (black to move):
My next win came rather unexpectedly when my opponent threw in the towel in an endgame where all the rooks were still on the board, but my opponent was a piece down after I found the following tactic earlier in the game:
My second-to-last game to finish was also a bit of an unexpected resignation, after my opponent played on for a while after losing the exchange (which I won in a more speculative manner than usual – I gave up two minor pieces for my opponent’s rook and two pawns (not always the best trade, as I explain here), but I correctly predicted my opponent might miss a tactic which would drop a knight to a queen fork.
And then my final game played out all the way to checkmate – I’ll admit I began writing this blog post a move before checkmate, but the final move was made by the time I got to this paragraph! I felt like I wasn’t doing amazingly well out of the opening, but fortunately things collapsed for my opponent in the middlegame (and I took the time to find a fork which won the queen, rather than just taking a free knight).
With all the timeouts and my four real wins, I ended on 22/22 and will progress to round 2 – incredibly similar to 2020 where I had 5 non-timeout wins and finished on the same score! I enjoyed taking things a little slower in the games and working a bit on my calculation, and even though there weren’t many games, I can definitely learn from them and bring my best to the next round – perhaps this will be the first year I make it to round 3, but my main goal is to enjoy the journey.
Thanks for reading this far, and all the best if you’re still playing in the competition yourself. I’ll see you in round 2!
