At the end of May I travelled to Zalakaros in Hungary to compete in a very strong international tournament. There were many GMs and I had 37th number on the starting list so I was full of hope to play with the best players but sometimes life is not easy and we need to accept a bad result… (Detailed results: http://www.chess-results.com/tnr207899.aspx?lan=1&art=1&rd=9&turdet=YES&flag=30&wi=984) From the very beginning I had a tough pairings, most of my opponents performed clearly above their rating but of course that’s not the only problem I had and a player who wants to improve needs to find other sources of bad result.

After extensive analysis of my own games I have drawn some conclusion (I’m not going to share it fully here but I can tell one of the biggest problems was related to proper and patient calculation probably caused by too many blitz games played over the Internet) and now I’m preparing a training plan which will improve my play.

Zalakaros

There were many players from Poland there!

The tournaments are not only about playing rated games, it’s also about analysing games with friends, meeting new people and spending free time well and in my view Zalakaros is a good place for it 🙂 The conditions at the playing hall were clearly above average level of European Events, all games in the main tournament were transmitted live, the players could analyse games afterwards in analysis room, enough space at the chessboard and there were free refreshments for the players each round. Zalakaros isn’t a big city but it’s a typical holiday city especially for older people so it was a nice place to have a good rest 🙂