A Recap Of the U20 European Champiosnhip

If you haven’t read any of my previous blogs or watched any of my recent videos, let me introduce myself. My name is Vidar and I’m a 20 year-old FIDE-Master from Sweden. Each week I try to focus on a specific theme of chess, after which I write down what I’ve learnt and post it here for everyone to read! My goal is to reach International Master before the Swedish championship begins next year, as I will compete in the strongest group.

I’ve just come back from Montenegro after competing in the U20 European Championship. Even though the hotel was terrible, its food barely edible and there was almost nothing to do in the small town of Cetinje, it has become one of my favorite tournament experiences of all time! Not because I played well or anything like that, but mostly because of the people there and all the friends I made :)

But how was the chess like?

As stated in my blog post that I posted right before the tournament, my goal was simply to not have a terrible tournament. These youth tournaments are really hard because a lot of people are underrated and also everybody prepares like their life depends on it.

And overall, I think I achieved that goal. I pretty much went +- 0, losing against higher rated and winning against lower rated. Even if I didn’t gain any elo I think I’ve learnt a lot from my games and I’d like to show some of the things I’ve learnt.

The first game I’d like to show was a win where I played the reversed benoni as white. I had never played it before but I really like it now because all of the ideas just came so naturally.

This game has inspired me to look into the benoni structure more. It’s one of the most interesting structures in chess and for this weeks theme I’d love to master it.

For the next game I’ll show where I got completely crushed and it helped me understand how opening knowledge can sometimes be a bad thing.

On sunday this week I'll make a video (and lichess post) going through how to play the benoni as both colors. If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to follow me here on lichess or subscribe to my youtube channel called "ZigZagChess".

Also I'm considering making an interactive lichess study about it if you're interested.

Thanks for reading and if you found this post useful please leave a like :)