The Labor Day Tournament Onslaught
On Thursday I played six rated games.
That would normally count as a session.
On Friday I entered six tournaments.
On Saturday I entered twenty-one.
This was no longer a session. This was an absolute onslaught of TOURNAMENTS.
Between the start of Friday’s FRC Rapid 257 Team Battle and Saturday night’s Hourly Crazyhouse Arena, I entered 27 Lichess arenas, played 72 tournament games, and collected 20 tournament points.
The two events began 42 hours apart.
Some people use a holiday weekend to get away from it all. I used mine to discover how many different ways Lichess could put a clock next to a position and tell me to survive.
Thursday: the warm-up
The activity record shows six rated games on Thursday: five bullet games and one rapid game.
Two bullet wins, three bullet losses, one rapid loss.
That was the quiet day.
No tournament points. No arena rank. No suspicion that the profile’s recent-tournaments page was about to become a solid wall of September 4 and September 5.
Friday: six arenas
Friday began at 2:00 a.m. Pacific with one 10+5 Chess960 game in the FRC Rapid team battle. At 10:00 a.m. came the Monthly Classical Arena: two 20+10 games, two losses, and a final rank of 1,512th out of 1,794.
Those were already two completely different forms of chess. One randomized the pieces. The other allowed enough time to become personally acquainted with every mistake.
Then Friday night accelerated:
- seven games of 1+2 atomic;
- two games in an hourly 5+0 blitz arena;
- one game in an Eastern 3+0 arena; and
- three games in an Eastern 5+0 arena.
Friday’s tournament total was six arenas, 16 games, and two points.
It was not yet the onslaught.
It was the onslaught clearing its throat.
Saturday: every button on the page
At midnight, two more arenas started almost simultaneously. At 1:00 a.m., another two. At 1:30, three. At 2:00, five.
By 2:00 a.m. Saturday, I had entered twelve tournaments since midnight.
The formats included blitz, ultra-bullet, antichess, horde, Chess960, crazyhouse, King of the Hill, and Racing Kings. There are sampler platters with less variety.
The tournament page kept offering nouns. I kept clicking them.
The day eventually produced 21 arenas, 56 tournament games, and 18 points. The schedule stretched from two tournaments at midnight to a 1+2 crazyhouse event at 8:00 p.m.
The sober description is that I explored Lichess’s arena system.
The honest description is that I attempted to establish a provisional rating in everything at once.
The final inventory
| Format | Arenas | Games | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blitz, 3+0 and 5+0 | 15 | 42 | 14 |
| Chess960 | 3 | 5 | 0 |
| Crazyhouse | 2 | 7 | 0 |
| Classical | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| Atomic | 1 | 7 | 0 |
| Horde | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Antichess | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| Racing Kings | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| King of the Hill | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| UltraBullet | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| Total | 27 | 72 | 20 |
Before this weekend, my arena history contained four tournaments. After it, the recent-tournaments page contained 31.
This one run accounts for 27 of them.
The leaderboards contain multitudes
The best raw finish was 13th out of 28 in the Hourly Horde Arena. I split the two games—one win and one loss—and received two points.
Next came 16th out of 30 in Racing Kings. One game, one win, two points. Efficiency briefly entered the building.
The strongest relative finish came in the ≤1500 Blitz Arena: three games, four points, and 42nd out of 118.
The other end of the table was also thoroughly explored. I finished 1,086th out of 1,090 in one Hourly SuperBlitz Arena and 1,042nd out of 1,047 in another.
Four players behind me in one, five in the other.
Not last remains undefeated.
What 72 games can and cannot teach
This was not a model training plan.
Ultra-bullet does not leave much room for a blunder check. Crazyhouse and atomic punish instincts imported from ordinary chess. Chess960 removes familiar opening coordinates. Horde asks a different material question. Racing Kings changes what check itself means. Moving directly among them can turn pattern recognition into pattern interference.
The onslaught was useful for a different reason: it made the borders visible.
“Chess” on one tournament page can mean 20+10 classical in a field of 1,794 players, then 15-second ultra-bullet, then a position with thirty-six white pawns, then a race in which checking the opponent is illegal. The pieces mostly keep their names. Almost everything else can change.
The results also separate participation from improvement. Playing 72 tournament games produces experience immediately. It does not produce 72 carefully reviewed lessons. Those still have to be extracted one at a time.
That comes next.
For one Labor Day weekend, the point was simpler: enter the field, accept the pairing, play whatever appeared, and see how large the tournament page could become.
The answer was 27.