From 30 July to 2 August 2026 I played the XIX. Prešov Open, and it was something different: seven rounds of classical chess spread over four days, two games a day, 88 players. Completely unplanned, it was the first time I had ever played a classical tournament — seven rounds at 90 minutes
- 30 seconds per move. Until then I had mostly played rapid tournaments and the occasional blitz. This tournament was a completely new experience for me, because the individual games demand a far higher level of concentration and patience than I — and my body — was used to.
On top of that, I went in with a standard rating of 1000, which in practice means unrated — so in all seven games I was the lower-rated player, by anywhere from 414 to 832 points.
I finished 66th out of 88 with 3 points: wins in rounds 2, 6 and 7, losses in the other four. The engine numbers are brutal in places, but they are also the whole point of writing this down. Below is every game, in order, with the boards playable move by move. Use the arrows or click a move in the list to follow along.
Round 1 — Zgoda, Aleksandra (1832) — loss
The pairing gods opened the tournament with the highest-rated opponent I would face all week. I went for
my usual Pirc with an early ...e5, and after 7.Qd2?! Nxe3! the game turned into a genuinely
comfortable middlegame — around move 15 the engine actually likes Black by a couple of tenths. My plan was simple, to utilize position and create a pin with Bd4 and win material. Unfortunately, Once I got oportunity to play it, I simply missed it because my mind was focused on a defence. I have to improve overall a schematic thinking to avoid being outplayed by counter offensive moves.
What followed was the most chaotic phase of the whole tournament — 22...c4??, 23.Rd2??, 25.Rd7?, 25...c6??, four
game-deciding errors in four moves, the evaluation swinging from +4.6 to +0.8 to -1.4 to +3.3. The one
that stuck was mine. After 28.Qxc4+! Qe6? the queens came off into a lost rook endgame and White
converted without much trouble.
My comment: I planned for a pin with Bd4 which never happened.
Round 2 — Barnoky, Tobias (1664) — win
An Alapin Sicilian where 6...e6?! already gave me a clear advantage, and 13...O-O? should have been
close to decisive. I found none of it — 14.Nxa6? threw most of the edge away in a single move, and
from move 22 onwards (22.Bxb6?) I was simply worse.
By move 33 I was lost: 33.Rab1?? b3! and Black is winning by roughly a rook. What saved the game
was my opponent’s nerves, not my play. Black returned the favour with 35...axb1=Q+?, then 37...Kg7?, and finally I was able to fight back with my only plan - to get my queen on the opposite side of the board and create a mating net. 38.Qg5! was the first move that actually made sense, and after 38.Qg5! Qa7? 39.Qf6+! the king walk to h6 and h5 was fatal. 43.Qf4! finished it — my first point of the tournament, and honestly not one I earned at the board.
My comment: I won, but just with a bad play of my opponent
Round 3 — Folta, Kacper (1806) — loss
The same Pirc structure as round 1, this time against a Polish junior. 6...g6?! was already slightly
loose, but the game stayed within a pawn of balance for twenty moves — a normal, playable position
where White pushes on the kingside and Black counters on the queenside.
23...Qe5?? was the one move that mattered. 24.fxg6! opened the h-file and cost the queen for
insufficient material, and after 25.gxh7+ Kg7?! the rooks came crashing in with 27.Re7 and
28.Rfxf7+. Two rounds, two losses where a single move flipped a balanced position.
My comment: *I underestimated the position and the quality of White. *
Round 4 — Schichman, Stefan (1653) — loss
This is the game I annotated most heavily, because it is the one I learned the most from. Bird’s
Opening into a Larsen setup, and my opening play was drifting: 5...Na6 took the knight away from the
e5 square, and 6...h5?! made castling awkward before I had a plan at all.
13...Nd5?? — timid play, a pointless pin — was punished immediately by 14.c4!, which I simply had
not seen. From there I decided to play actively and calculated a line to trap White’s light-squared
bishop, forgetting that the c4 and d4 pawns support 19.d5!.
And then the game turned again. 17.Bxa8??, 23.fxe5?? and 24.Nh3?? handed the whole thing back —
by move 24 the position was dead equal and I had 27...e3 available with real winning chances.
Instead 27...Rd2??, and 28.Bxg7!! came as a complete shock. I had been checking only the Qg5+
fork, thinking he was giving up a bishop for material. 29.Qh8#.
My comment: I had not to be afraid of unusual openings and be more flexible and offensive when it’s needed
Round 5 — Sivco, Lubomir (1562) — loss
A Ponziani, and a game where both of us were winning at least once. 5. cxd4? I played Ponziani maybe 1000 times still don’t understand how could I make this move. Somehow my muscle memory fast and automatically moved this piece instead of standard 5. e5. To be honest, after this move I was trembling of what I’m doing and why I cannot be concentrate and focused on a game. 10...d6?? gave me +6.5 — 11.d5! wins on the spot — and I played 11.O-O?? instead. Black immediately returned it with 11...dxe5??, I recaptured the wrong way with 12.dxe5??, and the position was level again.
The decisive moment came at move 22. I played 22.Rad1?? and left my queen on e2 on the open file:
22...Qxf6! 23.exf6 Rxe2 and Black wins a full piece. From there the rooks on the second rank
24...Rxa2, 26...Rxf2+, 28...Rxc3 ate everything and there was nothing left to defend.
My comment: Be patient in opening and control the moves before you make them
Round 6 — Januvka, Martin (1414) — win
The Scandinavian. After the Bojnice tournament in May, where an experienced player took me apart with exactly this opening, my written takeaway was “work on attacking against the Scandinavian Defence”. This game was the exam.
3...Qa5?! and 4...c6?! gave me a comfortable structure. By the way the move c6 as a response to annoying queen I observed in a game of Levy Rozman (aka GothamChess) and here it was used well. 9...Bd6?? was the blunder I was
waiting for: 10.Nxg4 wins a piece outright. Black grabbed 11...Bxh2+, and after 12.Kh1 the bishop
was trapped on h2 — 17.Kxh2 collected it and the position was completely resigned by then.
19...e5 20.Bxe5! Qxe5 21.dxe5 ended any last counterplay.
My comment: Coming soon — I will add my own thoughts on this game here.
Round 7 — Ptacek, Peter (1733) — win
The last round, against the second-highest-rated opponent I faced, who opened with 1.b4 — the
Sokolsky. I had never had this on the board before and had to work everything out over the board.
For thirty moves I was simply worse. 13...Ba6? cost a clear pawn’s worth of position, 29...Bc7? let
White reach +4.6, and 30.Nxa5! won the pawn. Around move 33 I was defending a queen endgame a pawn
down with a passed b-pawn coming at me. I think, the decisive turnaround came with 33...f6?! which computer considers a mistake, but I decided to focus on an attacking plan and not on defending. With this play, the enemy king was exposed alone and I had a chance to attack.
Then the game turned. 37.Kg2?? allowed 37...Qe6!, and suddenly the checks were on my side. 40.b6
was too slow, 43.Qa5?? was the final error and 43...Qe2! was decisive — after 45.e4 Qxe4+
46.Kh2 Qxd4 White is mated in four. The best game of my tournament, and the one where I stopped
panicking and just kept making moves.
My comment: Sometimes is better to attack and be aggressive, because it can force enemy to an error.
Tournament summary
- Date
- 30.7. - 2.8.2026
- Format
- 7 rounds, 90min + 30sec./move
- Players
- 88
- Placement
- 66.
- Score
- 3/7
What I take away from it
Looking at all seven games together, one pattern is impossible to miss: I did not lose a single game
in the opening. In rounds 1, 3, 4 and 5 I reached a position that was balanced or better, and every
one of them was decided by a single move — 18...e4?, 23...Qe5??, 27...Rd2??, 22.Rad1??. The
longer time control did not fix that; if anything it gave me more time to talk myself into bad ideas.
The second pattern is more encouraging. In round 6 I beat the Scandinavian, which was the exact weakness I wrote down as a to-do after May. And in round 7 I was worse for thirty moves against a 1733 and still won, because I kept making moves instead of collapsing. That is the part of my game that has actually improved since spring.
Takeaways: Quite interesting thing happened. Before the tournament I was online ELO of 2000 (both chess & lichess), but after analyzing my games and identifying crucial positional and tactical mistakes, I was able to increase my online ELO to 2100. This shows that analyzing own classical games and learning from mistakes can lead to significant improvement in chess performance. Because I spent a lot of focused time playing these classical games, I remember possitions better than in rapid or blitz games.
