With Hivechess week over and back to work, I have some posts that are a bit delayed, and while I wanted to talk about a series I've been watching, I think this is a little more important right now.
I'm talking about the Chess960 tournament that was played last week, on Friday if I'm not mistaken, where I played in one of these tournaments again after a long time without even playing a single game.
This chess format is a bit more complex than the traditional one, in the sense that the pieces are initially arranged in a way that in these variants there are usually no openings, but only basic principles to follow.
I think it's a rather interesting way to play chess nowadays, considering that many of the openings have already been thoroughly studied and it's very difficult to find anything new in them.
In these tournaments, there are usually very good players, and in fact, in most of the games I was in trouble, even against the lower-rated players.
But I kept calm and applied what I mentioned above: following the basic principles of chess, such as controlling the center and placing the pieces on the best squares we can.
Everything went quite well, and I was even able to beat some very experienced players. I felt in good form and finally achieved a new podium finish, this time in first place; it had been a while since I last did that.
In the overall standings, I'm a little lower down, but for the moment I think I'm more than fine. This was before the tournament where I finished in fourth place, so it can be said that this week has been quite good.
