Chess Diary: Concluding part

So, it all ended yesterday. My first tournament ended on a disappointing note for me, as I lost the last round to a player named Sanjay Gupta, rating 1749. It has started getting more and more frustrating, the way I fail to win games against sub 1900 players. I got three chances to do that in this tournament and I failed in all three, securing an ugly draw in one of them.

The irritating thing is that it is not that they are playing well to win. It is more a case of a blunder from me which costs me the game. After six rounds, I had scored 1.5 points out of a possible 6 and I was looking down the barrel. I aimed to win all five games to end up with a respectable score. I almost succeeded, as I won four on the trot but the loss in the last game is haunting me and I suppose it will continue to haunt me for quite some time. It was similar to the loss I incurred in our Inter MAHE championship against Swarup, the captian of the Kasturba Medical College, where I had blundered after having him on the mat for the first 20 odd moves. No wonder, I lost out on the prize by half a point and that is what I can't forget.

All in all, finishing with 5.5 points out of 11 was an average performance, if not bad and there were a lot of lessons to be learnt. I know my game better and I hope to prepare well for the next tournament, the one in Amity scheduled for mid May. My FIDE rating performance is 1588, which is way below the minimum I expected, i.e. 1700. I am not reading too much into it as of now because it is not my rating. If I improve my game in the next month or so, I am sure I would start with a 1700+ rating. I met a lot of people and made a lot of friends there, of all age groups. It is a pleasure to see children of 7-15 years of age play phenomenal chess and beating people of their parents and grandfather's age!

It is so very true that defeats teach you more than the wins. I never analyzed my game but now I will. Thankfully I have found some very helpful people there who have told me about the method to be adopted and hopefully I would put up a better show against the next 5 rated players that I meet.

The entire tournament was a pleasure, met a lot of people and I hope to learn in the future from the players like Saket, Saveson, Siddharth, Sanjay, Surendra and many more(ohh.. I didn't notice that all of the names start with S!!).