November Managerial Duels

Once again, the outcome of a managerial duel rested with the final judge…

This weekend, I took part in another managerial duel. I wrote about what these duels involve a couple of months ago. This time, I tried to learn from the mistakes I had made in the previous one.

As the saying goes, the harder you train, the easier the battle. The experienced Alexander Shevchuk coached me for the duel. We discussed the roles and the different ways events might unfold. The day before the contest, Alexander even arranged a short sparring duel, from which I picked up a couple of useful tricks.

My opponent was Viktor Konoplev, who had considerably more experience of these duels than I did. The gods of chance smiled on him: he assigned the roles in the first round, and I was given the weakest one. My coach and I had agreed that, if this happened, I would go on the defensive and shut down completely. Whenever my opponent tried to draw me out, I was to ignore the attempt as far as possible and hold my ground. We had also prepared a couple of distractions. I had to use one of them halfway through the round, after which the opposing team called a time-out to confer.

After the time-out, Viktor tried to throw me off balance, but I stuck to our agreed tactics. Then, in the very last second of the round, I inexplicably abandoned my position and opened up. I still cannot understand why I did it. One of the judges held it against me, and Alexander also highlighted it during the post-match debrief.

I began the second round from a strong position. I gave my opponent room to manoeuvre—which, incidentally, earned me a telling-off from one of the judges—summarised the information he gave me and steered it in the direction I needed. Halfway through the round, my second called a time-out, during which we discussed how to bring the duel to a close. From there, I followed the plan, although once again I made a last-minute remark that could ultimately have backfired on me.

I will not reveal the result here. Anyone who wants to know can watch the recording; I will post the link in the comments.

Thank you to Viktor for an excellent duel—I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also appreciate his permission to share the recording.

Thank you to Alexander for the excellent preparation. I learnt a great deal about how to prepare for a duel and how to conduct myself during one.

Thank you to Mikhail Zaborov for organising and running the duels.

And thank you to Airat Khusnutdinov for introducing me to this pastime and for his support during Saturday’s duel.

P.S. I now know what I still need to work on: keeping my emotions under control right to the final second. If I had not let them get the better of me in the closing moments of both rounds, the result might have been better.