Is it time to adjust my expectations as a professional chess player?

The beautiful city of Edinburgh, one of the top tourist destinations in the world. 

The Scottish chess championships are taking place and I really should be part of it. I agreed conditions with the organisers; admittedly they weren't great conditions, as the budget was limited, but I thought they were going to be enough to cover the accommodation at least.

Imagine my shock and disdain when I tried to book a hotel last week and found out that the cheapest price for eight nights was north of £900.

That's because the city of Dunfermline, where the tournament is taking place, is fairly close to Edinburgh and the whole area becomes extremely popular during the summer months. At least that was what I assumed was to blame for the very high prices.

There were other options; I could have stayed for six nights, rather than eight. I could have stayed outside of Dunfermline and commuted in everyday. But none of them seemed particular enticing.

I could have also stayed in an Airbnb, even though I don't really enjoy these experiences. I like the privacy of a hotel, and when you are a chess player you want to focus on the tournament. You don't really want to feel that you have to make conversation with the home owner, but that's the pressure I've felt when I've stayed in an Airbnb in the past. In any case, there didn't even seem many cheap Airbnb places available either, probably because the owners have also figured out they can charge pretty much what they want.

So I regret not booking in advance and getting somewhere much cheaper like Nick Skettos did, where he was able to book somewhere for six nights for around £300. 

Maybe I'm beating myself up too much on this whole experience, because my conclusion is that Dunfermline just isn't very big and there aren't many options in terms of booking hotels, or at least there aren't many cheap options.

In a roundabout way what I'm saying here is that maybe I need to downsize expectations as a chess player going forward, because I still could have played. I just needed to say, I'm not going to make a profit but at least it gets me out of the house and playing a chess tournament. It just feels rather depressing to lay out around 1.2K when my best case scenario in terms of prize money and conditions isn't much more than that. 

                      Money, or a lack of it, seems to be a recurring issue for chess players these days. 

Should I play, when I can't make a profit for the event? That is the question I'm asking here and that is the question I'm asking in general.

When I played in Alicante earlier in the year I shared a room and this seemed to be a common arrangement- many of the invited players were sharing. Most tournaments also now take place over five days rather than the traditional nine, which might have been the case 25 years ago.

All this is to save money for the organisers and there really isn't the budget to support a 2425 FIDE-rated grandmasters playing career. So when I say I should expect to make a profit from playing a tournament, this no longer seems like a realistic goal. Even much higher rated players than I, are now sharing rooms and taking much worse conditions than perhaps they had to before.

I need to wake up to a changed reality and accept that I'm not going to get to a rating of 2650+,  and that even 2500+ is now more or less unachievable for a player closing in on his fifties. I would need that 2650+ I think, to make a reasonably comfortable living from playing in chess tournaments. I could probably make £30k a year from that level, just from playing alone. I could play in leagues all around Europe and get better conditions in any opens that I chose to play. I would also be one of the favourites for the British chess championships that now has a reasonable prize fund, or at least better than it was last year. 

But all this is fantasy land, because I'm not 2650+ and never going to be, not now. So I have to readjust and make smaller goals and aim perhaps to get to 2450+ and see that as a personal win, and don't beat myself up about the fact that in a wider sense, nobody actually gives a fuck. 

I feel that over the last few years my chess has really regressed, mainly because I simply haven't played enough. Just lately I seemed to have been turning the corner from that, so it would be a shame if I stopped playing enough tournaments simply because the conditions weren't as ideal as I would have liked. It is time to accept a new reality and stop moaning.