By September, 2022 I had spent two years working on my chess using completely online tools. I had played in a single OTB tournament, which had mostly served notice to me of how much I needed to work on. But my work had improved to the point that I was loving it and I knew that I was playing better than I had ever played before. Nevertheless, it was with some real nervousness that on a whim I decided to go to my local quads tournament put on by the Lehigh Valley Chess Association one Saturday.

I honestly wasn’t sure what level of player played in these tournaments, which today seems silly because they post all the cross-tables online. When I signed up, I thought I might be the top player in the top quad by some distance, which is not the best way of making master. Then the organizer grumbled “The masters always show up late.” Indeed, ten minutes after the tournament was supposed to start, in came two masters, Matthew O’Brien and Peter Minear. I owe a real debt of gratitude to these two people.

For any community to exist, it requires at a minimum that people show up. For a strong chess community to exist, it requires that strong players show up. Matthew and Peter are strong players and they show up. That dinky Saturday quads tournament - played in a church basement in a Sunday School room full of small chairs intended for toddlers - was a destination event for players trying to improve. It was so because Matthew and Peter came nearly every single Saturday to play, and went to a local diner afterwards to analyze games with all comers until the place closed. Other strong players came because they knew they could get some good games in, and young, improving players came because they could consistently get games against strong players on a random Saturday. I’m not sure I would have ever made master if it weren’t for the strong, regular quads that were available every Saturday, and those existed mostly because of Peter’s and Matthew’s commitment.

What’s more, Peter’s and Matthew’s commitment to building the local chess community in the Lehigh Valley has made a world of difference to the people who have encountered that community. It is a community where people help each other and root for each other’s success - which can be rare in the context of a zero-sum game. The outings at the diner that follow these Saturday quads remind me a lot of the Richard Shorman classes that made me love the game in the first place. Ultimately, a strong chess community is one of the best reasons to actually play the game. In my case, now that I’ve made the rating goal I had set for myself, the community is the reason I plan to keep playing and working and setting new goals for myself (although probably not rating-oriented goals).

That first Saturday quad for me was a corker. Nobody had really seen me before, and given that I was an older player it could be provisionally assumed that I was probably more of a positional player who played simple openings. In fact, chaotic positions remained my greatest strength, and while I was playing mostly solid openings I had been working on them extensively. From the white side of a classical Caro-Kann, Matthew just survived an opposite-colored bishop ending, and Peter got blasted off the board when he allowed the c5 Shirov pawn sac in the fianchetto King’s Indian Defense. I also beat the 1800 player who made up the fourth, so I won the quad. Matthew and Peter both quickly adjusted - in fact, I have yet to beat Peter again to date despite many attempts - but that first week gave me a lot of hope that I had done what I needed to do in order to become a master-strength player.

Those hopes were a bit misleading. I still had a lot to learn about myself and about optimizing my OTB play. I would mostly learn those things by playing at the LVCA quads. Month after month I kept going back into the arena, with some prominent successes and some dismal failures. I kept focusing on the things I knew to optimize my results - maintaining a good mindset, staying objective and doing the work. My rating kept vacillating between 2130 and about 2170 until I learned the final thing that I needed to make the last little push. It is that little thing that I will focus on to finish up this guide.