I almost forgot about today's event due to mixed up with a lot of activities on my schedule. I can feel the stress getting to me as I am currently under the weather. For others, this might sound weird but lately I have been using chess as a form of relief from everything going on. Although I didn't play at my utmost best in today's event but it was still relieving to me. I had some interesting games. I finished in 8th place in the event, with a win rate of 56%, a performance of 2033 and berserk rate of 56% as well.
There are lots of stronger players showing up now and I am excited because it means if I get a win against them, it is a huge rating boost for me.
This is the game I won against Jaki who is also one of the strong players. I became a piece up from the middlegame and I did my best to hold on to the pieces right to the endgame. Nothing made it much better like when he berserk me, which gave me the upper hand because he did not have much time to think about his moves or look for the best ones.
The endgame was drawn but it was harder for him to defend because of his low time and I did my best to capitalize on the advantage. This led to a mating position for me which brought the win.
This game against Fiona has to be highlighted but I was super lucky to escape the mating threat on my king. From the opening stage, it was completely unorthodox and I could not understand what I was playing. Right from missing a free pawn to almost getting checkmate, nothing shocked me more than how the threats began to roll in and at that point I could not overcome it anymore. At any point, I could have been checkmated.
It wasn't really shocking anymore at this point when we could not play well anymore. At this point in time where you have seconds on the board, you have nothing but time to play for and I was lucky i got the best hand out of it. Chess is such a funny game, that when you think you could overlook a player, there are certain times you can get carried away by the time and begin to lose on time. Do not forget, it is a time game as well. You could lose on time.