The March 12, 2023 East Market Swiss will always be one of the most special tournaments of my chess career. That is not because I shared first place, but rather because it was my eight year old daughter Rachel Sophia's first rated tournament. I taught Rachel how to set up the pieces when she was two years old, and she learned the basic rules well enough to play a chess game before she was three years old, but up until this point she had been more interested in playing casual games than in playing tournament games. A while ago, I explained to her the differences between tournament chess and casual chess, and I left it up to her to decide if/when she would like to play in a rated tournament.
I showed the East Market to Rachel during FaceTime, and perhaps seeing the playing site in advance helped her decide to take the plunge. I told Rachel that I lost all five games in my first rated tournament, so the goal at the beginning is to have fun and learn as opposed to focusing on the final result. Rachel is probably better at enjoying a game without focusing on the final result than I am anyway, so she may not have even needed that message!
Rachel's only concern about playing rated chess is that it is difficult for her to both record the moves and use the clock (she is fully capable of doing both, but prefers not to do both during the same game). I understand that there are two valid perspectives about this: one perspective is that a child should wait to play tournament chess until the child is able to follow all of the tournament rules, while the other perspective is that the value of early immersion in the tournament environment is more important than writing down the moves. I have been both a player and a coach, and my perspective is that this should be dealt with on a case by case basis with young children. The reality is that most young children who keep score produce scoresheets that are riddled with inaccuracies and missing moves, so unless a child is already proficient at keeping score I think it is more beneficial to practice that skill in between tournaments, and to use tournaments as an opportunity to practice playing skills and clock management "under fire." Rachel is eight years old and the East Market Swiss is not a national championship or a FIDE rated event, so from my perspective Rachel is sufficiently prepared because she knows the rules of tournament chess and can play a game with a clock without any assistance. However, I checked with East Market tournament director Lou Friscoe before the event to make sure that he would be OK with Rachel not keeping notation, and he said that would be fine.
Rachel lost her first two rated games, but her round three game was a long battle in which both sides had winning chances. Rachel won after noticing that her opponent had run out of time. She politely pointed this out to tournament director Lou Friscoe, who declared Rachel the winner because she still had sufficient checkmating material left on the board. Rachel lost her fourth round game, but overall we both enjoyed the whole day's experience, from listening to music during the car ride to East Market to having pizza for lunch at East Market to playing video games between rounds to going to Book Loft after the tournament ended. All of Rachel's opponents were gracious, and each provided me with a copy of his scoresheet (which matters more to me than Rachel now, but may be significant to Rachel later if she becomes interested in going over her games or just looking back on how she played during her first rated games). Rachel's four game provisional rating is 685.
Playing tournament games while also wondering how Rachel is doing is a new experience for me. The end result--three straight wins followed by a last round draw with the second seeded player--was good, but I had some concentration lapses at times. I was the top seeded player, so even a 4-0 performance would not have netted a large rating point gain, but winning the tournament and gaining three points while Rachel also won a game is about the best that I could have expected.
I played in two other over the board chess tournaments since I wrote Journey to the National Master Title, Part 2, scoring 3/4 in the February 26, 2023 East Market Swiss to tie for third place while losing three rating points, and scoring 3/4 in the February 18, 2023 G/45 Open (in Columbus) to tie for second place while gaining five rating points. Overall, I scored eight wins, one loss, and three draws in those three tournaments, with one first place finish. With a rating of 2013 after these three events, I need to gain 187 points to reach my goal.
In 2023, I have scored 22 wins, seven draws, and four losses in regular
rated tournament games with four first place finishes in nine
events--but two losses to players rated below 1700 were costly, and as a result my net rating gain for 2023 is just one point so far. The good news is that my official rating supplement rating has been above 2000 each month since April 2022, my longest such streak since 2017; I have established a beachhead above 2000, and the next step is to surpass the 2100 level.
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