Nationals 2022
If you aren't familiar with it, the National Scholastic Chess Championship is a tournament where people around the country compete against other people in their grade (90|10D time control). Normally, it's held in Florida, but this year, they moved it to Maryland for some reason. That means instead of a plane ride, I could just go there in my mom's car, which is good because, according to all known laws of aviation, united airlines is the biggest looser i ever seen.
Anyway, after school on Thursday our academic league team won against some other random highschool, and I went straight from there to Maryland. We arrived at around 11 PM so I just went to sleep; pretty sure I missed the blitz or bughouse or something though. The tournament was at the GAYLORD national resort, but I stayed in a random Westin hotel because I booked the hotel too late, and the GAYLORD national resort was full.
On Friday, the first round was at 1 PM. I got paired as white against some 1300. After Nico Chasin and I signed up, literally half of the strong players withdraw bc they were chikin (the 3rd seed was a mere 2200), so the first round pairing was lower than it usually is (1500). Of course, he had no games online for me to prepare from (actually none of my opponents did other than Nico), so I showed up like half an hour early. They did the opening ceremony ritual of doing some blablabla speech and having some random woman sing the national anthem. It was pretty mid, 5/10, but I don't think it was her fault since the playing hall there was quite bad for sound, and the microphone didn't amplify it enough. After that, they starting yelling at the parents to get out, and the parents started to not get out. I found my board and saw a note which said that Nico, me, and the 3rd seed were all on DGT boards in the closed off section. I was sitting next to Nico, and the 3rd seed was across the aisle sitting next to Evan Park, who won 9th grade (I knew Evan from going to big tournaments and because we used to have the same coach and from him singing "Better Now" everywhere: playing hall, restaurants, airports. He was 2000 when I saw him last, and now he's an IM as well, though he's dropped below 2400; I guess you could say he's better now). Nico's opponent and my opponent also got there pretty early. Nico's opponent was also a 1300, but he claimed to have beaten a GM, and apparently he "didn't remember his name but it was some Indian guy". Nico beat him in like an hour, and as for my game...
A fairly easy first round. After the game, I just slep until the pairing were up; my second round opponent was a random 1800. Somehow he got there before me (I was half an hour early again)... anyway, here's the game
Second game also wasn't very difficult, not really a surprise. Nothing happened between any of the rounds other than slep... so onto game 3, which was against some 2000 player. He claimed to have played me before, but I didn't remember him. In the game, I decided to do funny bc I was bored and threw utterly winning position, but won anyway because haha time
And here's round 4, which was against some random 2100 I didn't know
Round 5 was against this guy named Jack Levine, who I beat in the last round of 5th grade nationals. He is now about 2200
On the penultimate round I played Nico Chasin. Short bio for him: he lives in New York, plays a lot of chess at the Marshall Chess Club, won nationals last year (I didn't go last year) and came back this year to win school prize (they didn't win school prize). Our current score (counting this game) is I beat him 3 times, we drew twice, and he beat me once. We also played USATE three times together as boards 2 and 3; we got 3rd place in 2017. He is coached by the Georgian grandmaster Giorgi Kacheishvili, and as a result, he is very good at blitz, has great intuition, and didn't know openings very well. Recently (this year), I believe that Nico has been patching up the holes in his style, greatly improving his calculation and his openings, which used to be weaknesses, and he became IM as well. Today he is a strong, well-rounded player. Going into the game, I was ahead on tiebreakers, and he didn't care about winning individual first... so:
In the final round, I played some random 2100 who apparently did well in blitz (speaking of which, congrats to @kowarenai for winning it), and Nico played Toshinori Underwood, a 2000 who was somehow 6-0. Nico and I both had some struggles; he got into R+3PvsR+2P endgame against Underwood, but Underwood somehow managed to lose (he blames the TD for being too loud). As for me,
So I got first on tiebreaks. Nico's school CGPS also tied for first place team, but they lost on tiebreaks. We then proceeded to the award ceremony where they had all the top 10s of each section sit in rows. We got slips of paper with "1st" through "10th" on them, and the TD that Underwood blamed for his loss told us to guard it with our lives. The paper slips were literally scoresheets that were printed onto on the other side, since US Chess was too destitute to afford more paper. They were also too destitute to give us trophies, and they were too destitute to even give participation medals.
If you are a US Chess enjoyer or are here looking for TLDR I wish you a very 
