The best tournament preparation is boring: review your games, fix recurring mistakes, and arrive with a small set of plans you trust. The goal is not to learn a new opening in two weeks.
Week one: audit your recent games
Take your last ten serious games and run full reviews. Group the mistakes:
- Tactical: missed forks, pins, back-rank mates, discovered attacks.
- Strategic: wrong pawn breaks, bad trades, pieces on the wrong side.
- Clock: time trouble, rushing, long thinks on quiet moves.
Pick the single most common category. That is your training theme for the week.
Build a small repertoire
You do not need a complete opening system. Choose one line as White and one defence to 1.e4 and 1.d4 as Black. Know the first 8–10 moves and, more importantly, the typical plans. Test the lines in a few rapid games.
Drill endgames
Learn three practical endings: rook and pawn vs rook, king and pawn vs king, and bishop and pawn vs bishop. These appear constantly and are often decided by technique rather than calculation.
Week two: simulate
Play two or three longer games at the tournament time control. Review them the same day. Do not cram new opening lines the night before; sleep is part of preparation.
Day before
Check the schedule, the time control and the venue. Prepare a short pre-game routine: review one opening file, solve two easy puzzles, and stop. Your job is to arrive calm, not to learn a new variation.
Use the game library for the audit and the puzzle set for the tactical theme.
See the whole game, not just the blunder.
Choose a review depth, see the maximum cost, and get move-by-move accuracy with blunder, mistake and inaccuracy markers.