This is a tournament I played in las vegas during 2010. About 150 people showed up in the u-1900 uscf section which I was a part of. The tournament lasted 7 rounds, and the time controls were 2 hrs + 1h/40moves. This was and is the strongest tournament Ive ever played in, so although I didnt win it, my results were still satisfying.

In the first round I was black and my opponent played what I'd consider a really weird opening. I think I reacted well.

This tournament was very strong, it had very significant money prizes for my section, so there were a few severely underrated players playing. Unbeknownst to me my next opponent had an even record against 2000-2100 rated players, despite being rated 1884. He finished just out of the prize money in 11th place, but last I checked hes now rated 2000. Heres our game.

After that loss I knew that if I wanted a shot at the top prize money I had to win all the rest of my games. With that in mind I faced my next opponent.

Very nice job ! You've already improved your understanding of the KID defence by a great leap, seeing that trading the light-square bishop is a nice way to stop the attack on the kingside.

You played well in the other two games : I'm pretty sure with more practice, you'll see some good progress.

Thanks hicetnunc, I like to think Ive improved a lot in this last year in terms of understanding the openings, even if I still dont know the exact variations. Here are two more games.

Its funny, this round according to my friends my opponent was trying hard to distract me by bumping his chair up and down, popping his bubblegum, and staring at me but i was completely oblivious to it all. I was just focused on the chess.

I was still determined to win the my next games but I ran into some big problems in this one. I never stopped trying though.

Last two games are pretty good too. Maybe a few more trades would have done the trick in game 4. I think Bxb1 and Bxa3 is perfectly fine, but it's never easy to be under pressure all over the board.

ya ponnu, right after I got back from the tournament I looked it up. I know it somewhat better, but it's only right now that Im getting serious about my opening study. Just learned the Gligorich, exchange variation, and petrosian set up to the KID. Im gonna be moving on to the classical KID in my starting out KID book by Gallagher, which Im somewhat familiar with, but I want actual variations/theory to improve my play. It will definitely be fun in tournaments to bust out all these ways to attack the KID if I see it as white . As black I want to get out of the opening in a good attacking position and try to outplay them.

Also thanks, glad you guys are enjoying my games. I should have the final two up either later today or tomorrow.

Ugggh I spent the last hour annotating a game and then posted it, but the forums lost it. I will do it again when I get back, I have to go to a dentist right now.

Im glad you enjoy! So this was my final day of the tournament and I was pretty beat from the previous rounds, to get a prize I knew I needed a strong performance in these last two games. I calculated a lot of variations in this next game, but I cant remember them all so Ill just try my best to describe what was going on.

Alright got that game up one more to go. I had a 4 out of 6 record at this point.

To prevent the accidental erasing of your posts, what you can do is write all the comments directly in a pgn file and copy/paste them in chess.com's pgn editor.

Good games.