As happens every Friday, there's a new tournament in hive's favorite chess community, and this tournament is quite important because I didn't participate in last week's tournament and was deducted from a few spots.
So it was up to me to make up for all my losses and perform well without having trained for about three weeks, but it seems it didn't matter because I still got a good result.
I even surprised myself by beating some players who have a much higher rating than me and by having good positions against fairly strong players.
I didn't feel the pressure even when using the berserk, which took away half of my points but ensured I would double the points earned. This is very useful, especially against players I have a higher chance of winning.
But even against these players, I felt like several games were getting out of hand very quickly. You only have to watch my first game to understand why, because I lost all control and lost a valuable first three points at the beginning.
Luckily, I think the tournament liked me and quickly paired me with other players so I could keep playing and thus opt for more points.
But throughout the tournament, I felt pretty confident, as if I didn't take the tournament too seriously, knowing I hadn't trained for the past three weeks and there were plenty of strong players around.
Looking at the standings, I was in second place ahead of almost everyone at the end of the tournament, but in a brief moment when they could have snatched that second place away from me, they did so with quite a bit of class.
All that remains for me is to congratulate you all for such a great tournament and such good games, and I hope the ones I post here are the best I've played this entire season.