Winning an open is not the same as scoring well in one

Winning an open tournament is a different problem from scoring well in one.

Scoring well is about not losing. Winning means that somewhere in the last two rounds you have to take a risk a draw would have avoided — and take it at the moment when every instinct says protect what you have.

The last round

Going into round nine at Brasov I was level at the top, with white against Cristobal Henriquez Villagra. A draw would probably have been enough to finish joint first. Probably.

Tie-breaks in a large Swiss are not something to rely on, and they are not something you can calculate at the board either. The honest arithmetic is that a quiet draw hands the decision to a table of numbers you do not control.

I played for the win. Two of us finished on 7.5 out of 9, and the tie-break happened to fall my way — which is exactly the outcome I had been unwilling to depend on three hours earlier.

What preparation is actually for

The reason to work with seconds is not that they find moves you could not find. It is that they find them before the game, so that at the board you are spending your clock on the position rather than on recall.

At this level the preparation gap is settled before move one. That is the single most expensive thing about chess above 2600, and the least visible from outside.

Three draws that mattered more than three wins

Rounds five, six and eight were draws. The 118-move endgame against Gavrilescu in round five is the one I would point at: six hours, no result, and it kept the tournament alive.

Nobody writes about the draws. They are where the tournament was won.