Waiting for Round 2

The first round of the annual chess.com daily tournament proved to be way more exciting than I initially anticipated. When I signed up on Christmas day, 2022 I didn't realize how involved this tournament would become. Almost 35,000 players signed up and they were divided into over 2,000 groups with 12 players in each group. One (or two if there's a tie for first place) would advance to the next round. That's it. If you're not part of that group, then you're out, and can wait for 2024 to try again.

After only three weeks of playing in the tournament, I was happy to find that my 21 points were enough to see me through! I was so excited and started thinking about how I would go about giving my best effort during round two. And then the waiting began. I opened the chess app and found there were 'only' 800 games left to be played. They seemed to finish at a rapid 100 or so games per day, so I figured in about a week we would start round two.

Two weeks passed and still there were over a 100 games to be played.  Mid-February arrived and still the games seemed to take an eternity. I would wake up in the morning and check my phone, only to find that only a small dent had been made in the number of games left. I decided to play some blitz chess and try to forget about the tournament for a while. But a few minutes later I would check the competition again, thinking that maybe, just maybe some more games had finished. 

The end of February arrived and about 3,000 qualifiers looked on hopefully. There were only 13 games remaining, and only about 6 of those had to finish in order for round two to start. We began speculating on who would finish first. 

There were some games that were obviously only a few moves away from resignation:

And other intricate draws (?):

And some very technical endgames:

But the game that we knew would be the last to finish was a complicated one between India and Poland. Due to a technical glitch, their game started late, and we all watched carefully as they played out their expert moves:

My guess is the new round will start on March 10. Let's see if I'm right...