With the first three tournament rounds going loss-draw-loss, I was sitting on -2 with a White coming up. The way I was playing, I did not relish another struggle in the Stonewall Attack, so decided I had to do something different to break the streak, turning to the English Opening. I ended up with exactly what I needed - after a number of exchanges, a much less stressful game with a small positional pull heading into a reduced material middlegame. This time, I handled the limited tactics well and converted into a winning pawn-up endgame.
The success here was more due to "meta" - the correct choice of opening, which really means the type of positions you want to play - than brilliant play over the board. This points out the value of having multiple openings in your repertoire, for different tournament situations or simply personal feelings on the day. Korchnoi often alluded to these types of choices in his annotations; mood can matter, as can listening to what your brain feels like doing at that particular time. There's also the simple rule that if you are threatening to "tilt", you should deliberately choose do something different than what you've been doing, and not keep going with the same approach that is obviously not working for you (at least in the moment).
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