No Pain, No Gain

I have been an avid chess player since the pandemic. Like many children around the world, I was taught the rules and some basic strategy at a relatively young age; my father introduced my brother and me to the game in the early-to-mid-2000s. Now, some 20 years and 11 000 games later, I have a roughly 1900-level playing strength here on Lichess, and have competed in some in-person OTB events including the 2025 Maritime Chess Festival where I had the unique opportunity to meet Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura.

Sharpening the Sword

While I have been an avid player for a few years now, I have only become a serious player relatively recently. What's the difference? My answer: competition. You see, until the tail end of 2024, my "competitive" chess scene was the odd Lichess arena event, often with a rating cap, and with so many players that winning the whole thing was seldom the goal. Sure, it invited me to play decent chess against players around my level, but it was missing the high-stakes, high-pressure nature of truly competitive environments. There was no embarrassment after a sloppy loss, just a quiet withdrawal from the event.

In early 2025, I discovered the Maritime Chess Club (MCC) right here on Lichess. With regular internal evening events during the week, Lichess Liga and Lichess Rapid League involvement, and the bimonthly CFC-rated tournament, this allowed me to enter into a new level of competition. The evening events attract a dozen or so players, in comparison with the hundreds in Lichess arena events. Regular players become familiar names, and their opening traps become familiar foes once you've played each other a few dozen times. Lichess Liga and Lichess Rapid League tournaments involve promotion and relegation, meaning that the whole team must come together and work together to push for promotion, or sometimes to simply avoid relegation. These team battles create a sense of competition as well as camaraderie, and because they have no rating cap, you might face an 1100 in one game and then a 2400-rated FM in your next. You learn to adapt to wildly different opposition strengths quickly, and in the tight time controls of Lichess Liga, you learn never to treat an 1100 like free points, or to write off your game against a 2400 as an automatic loss.

Towards the end of 2025, and through my involvement in the MCC, I came to know about the Maritime Chess Festival taking place in October in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. This was an event that GM Hikaru Nakamura also attended on his quest to play the requisite 40 classical games to qualify for the 2026 Candidates (which he did!). This completely transformed what I thought I knew about chess. Playing classical time controls, I learned just how different 90+30 OTB games are from 3+2 online blitz. I had to train myself to sit on my hands before playing a move, because otherwise I would play quickly and often squander my advantage. The worst part? An embarrassing loss in an OTB event can't be quickly remedied by anonymously withdrawing from the event as though it never happened. Especially in smaller OTB events, people know your name, your face, and your absence changes the pairings for future rounds, sometimes in a rather conspicuous way.

The end result was that playing OTB chess, classical chess, and planning ahead of time for those events helped improve my chess discipline. No, I'm not a vastly better player than I was a year ago, but I have pulled off some feats I would have thought impossible. Through regular online play with the MCC, I get frequent opportunities to play against, and sometimes establish some form of connection with, International Masters from Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Preparing for the Maritime Chess Festival helped me build a chess study schedule and encouraged me to actually stick to it.

Now, in early 2026, and far away from the OTB events I played in last year, I notice the true effects of competition on my play. Going back to Lichess arena tournaments simply isn't enough anymore. The stakes, the pressure, and the excitement of a competitive environment are completely transformative. I crave new tournament opportunities, even online, as a way to continue structuring my chess, using the tournaments themselves as "checkpoints" where I can gather some intel about whether my current methods are working and where my weaknesses lie.

Put Yourself to the Test

I don't want to be reliant on others for creating and running chess tournaments. As I work towards my National Arbiter title, I want to become part of the community that not just plays chess, but facilitates improvement for other players. So, I have created a new chess club on Lichess called DaggerChess. With our first grand-prix-style event coming up in the middle of March, I invite you all to come and play in the DaggerChess February Warm-Up tournament this Saturday, February 21. This is a 7-round Swiss with a time control of 15+5, the same format that will be used in the upcoming DaggerChess Grand Prix (DCGP). Help us grow the community and build a competitive playing environment. It is you, the players, who will push each other to improve, to be more disciplined, and to become better, sharper, and more resilient chess players.