Soon, on May 11th, there is the Second Marathon of the Year - The Spring Marathon. This will be a 5+0 arena tournament which lasts 24 hours. There are even trophies up for grabs for coming top 500, 100, 50, 10 and of course, first. This blog has the aim to help as much as possible with preparation for the tournament as well as how to keep yourself playing well during the tournament, whether you play the full marathon or not. There will be 5 top tips included in this blog. I really hope this helps a lot of people.
Exercise Exercise is definitely one of the key factors to playing well in chess, and not only chess. Exercise helps with everything. This can be done in a variety of ways. You may want to do lots of exercise the day before the marathon or you may want to do some hourly breaks in the middle of the tournament. The choice is yours, but make sure you take this into account if you are planning on playing in the Marathon.
Nutrition Now we have nutrition. Eating food and having some drinks helps our body stay awake and perform at its best for us. However, this does not mean have junk food.. Junk food just makes your mental state worse when playing Chess. Instead, have some fruit and eat healthily. Trust me, its worth it.
Tilt Next up, we have tilt. This is vital if you want to do well whilst keeping your rating from falling hundreds of rating points within the 24 hours that you might play. If you lose a game, take it in, and learn why you lost the game. Every mistake means an opportunity to improve. It is impossible to play at 100% for a long time - That's the point of this blog, and the point of understanding how to prevent tilt.
Breaks This sort of ties in with the first two tips. But here, we are also looking at your vision. You do not want to be looking at a screen for long periods of time. Instead, you should be aiming to play for about half an hour and then taking a 1 minute (as short as this!) break to just look outside. Your eyes will thank you for this and the results will follow!
Do not be obsessed with where you are placed Finally, we have the tip, "do not be obsessed with where you are placed". By this, I mean stop worrying about where you are in the rankings because, after all you have 24 hours to make a difference and most likely, your best play is yet to come. If you let your ranking get to you, you will only stop yourself from getting a good ranking and you will also lose many, many rating points.
Thank you for reading this post! I really hope that this helps people with preparation as well as how to go through the journey of the most played tournament in Chess! Please drop a like if this helped you in any way!
