Kostya on Norm #1: Staying Present
By Kostya Kavutskiy
November 18, 2014
“The first norm is always the hardest.” – If I had to count the number of titled players who’ve said this to me over the past few years, I’d run out of fingers. Fortunately, I recently earned my first IM-norm at the 2014 Spice Cup Open (October 21-26), organized by Susan Polgar and Paul Truong, who run the wildly successful SPICE program at Webster University.
I hope the above sentiment turns out to be true as I’ve been chasing this first norm for a couple of years now. There were a few close calls, but the closest was the 2013 Spice Cup, where I posted a performance above 2450 yet missed the foreign player requirement by exactly one. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about last year’s “tragedy”, gripped by the notion that if I should continue to play at IM-level, the norms would come eventually.
Moreover, my unabashed goal is to become a Grandmaster, meaning short-term results aren’t as important to me as the long-term process itself – learning from mistakes, expanding my knowledge, and working to reach my full potential. Nevertheless, I was thrilled and relieved to finally get this first norm, a stubborn road block. The praise I received from both chess playing friends and non-chess playing friends was lovely as well, so I’m grateful for that.
Ironically, after writing the well-received piece “Breaking 2366”, which was about breaking out of my first chess slump (and earned #3 in that year’s Best of CLO honors), I fell into yet another chess slump!! This one was different – previously my issue was failing to realize that improvement would become exponentially more difficult as I got better and faced stiffer competition. This time (meaning the last few years), my play became inconsistent, to put it mildly. My level of play in any given tournament ranged from 2000-2500, often starting strong and finishing poorly. I’d blown a lot of games with silly blunders, and rating points gained in one tournament were lost in the next.
My performance at the Spice Cup seems like a fairly peachy sign for the future. I’d describe my play as solid, but unspectacular — My final score was 5/9, good for a performance of 2474. Here are two wins that contributed to my result. I didn’t have to do anything special to win either, it was rather a case of my opponents not playing their best:
The organization at the Spice Cup was fantastic, and I would strongly recommend the tournament for any norm-seekers out there. Susan and Paul put in a lot of effort to run the event.
Full article here: http://www.uschess.org
Well done Kostya.