I just finished the 2024 Saint Louis Masters, one of the strongest tournaments I’ve ever competed in. It’s been about three months since I last played classical, and although I’ve been training, clearly I haven’t been playing enough as I felt quite rusty going into the event!
Despite a rough start (0.5/3), my final result was decent—4.0/9 for a 2417 performance. Seeded 51st out of 59, I ended up sharing 2nd place u2400 with four other players. For now I’ll just provide a brief summary of the tournament, but in the coming week I’ll be analyzing my games and will soon do a video recap.
The playing conditions were quite enjoyable—despite the cold St. Louis winter, the playing hall was actually rather cozy and there was endless coffee & snacks, not to mention chess sets and clocks provided for each board! (I know that’s not impressive for Europeans).
I started off with a very one-sided loss to GM Kevlishvili, before making a draw against GM Batsuren. I then lost again to GM-elect Kirk Ghazarian, but at least not without a long struggle. With low confidence, I managed to win in Round 4 against IM Justus Williams, playing 1.e4 which is always a big thrill for me. From there my tournament stabilized, as I drew comfortably with IMs Josiah Stearman, Varun Krishnan, and Ryo Chen.
In Round 8 I faced another strong junior — IM Alice Lee. I was quickly worse with White out of the opening, but managed to slowly turn things around and eventually win the game. That was pretty huge as I managed to get back to an even 4.0/8, of course before getting absolutely demolished in the last game against GM Kantor.
So overall definitely some positives and some negatives. I lost three games with Black (none with White, woo hoo), including two that were more or less without a fight. I did feel like my calculation was a bit more precise than usual, but I won’t be able to fully judge until I really look at the games.
After the event it seems like my rating will cross back over 2350, so the road back to 2400 continues! I have no plans to play anywhere for the near future, but will definitely be looking to play some opens starting in Spring 2025 (open to suggestions 🙂).
For the next three days I’ll be closely following/covering the final two games (and tiebreak of course who are we kidding) of the Ding-Gukesh 2024 World Championship match. So check out Dojo’s Twitch / YouTube in the coming days, I can’t imagine the finale will be anything less than incredibly dramatic!
After that, it’ll be back to training and getting ready for the new year. Cheers.
Congrats on an excellent tournament!
Fantastic Resilience.