A Tale of Two Team Matches (sorry I missed last week)
Hi, and happy early holidays! 
We did have a team match last week, and why did I miss last week? Perhaps I was frustrated with my performance (spoiler!), and also, my week then was busy. As we played the match Sunday afternoon, and if my memory serves me correct, I had to go to school that Monday, then Thanksgiving came around the corner... I think those could be contributing factors!
Let's get to the matches... our fourth match was against the Secret Dark Knight's Society. We were 1.5/3 (1 match win, 1 match loss, 1 match draw), and we were facing a very tough team! Here are my garbage games, enjoy!
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LESSONS LEARNED:
- I need more confidence against the Meran, playing e5 at some point. Because Black got what they wanted with b4/c5, etc.
- Just an ugly game overall (even though I got chances in the end), that I want to forget soon
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My games are in here somewhere
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Oh, and BTW, I guess I was not the only one with a bad day, here are the match results, rapid and blitz respectively:
One team was just way better than the other team
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OK, so on to today's matchup against the Billiard's Cafe Chess Club in Massachusetts (hence the thumbnail)... supposedly it was snowing hard in their area? Let's see if I can play more beautiful than snow... doubt it! 
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With this being a "boring" draw (somewhat interesting though), I don't know of many lessons learned. I do feel like I should have been more aware of Black's c5 idea, and maybe I can just spend some time studying this opening a little
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LESSONS LEARNED:
- On 5... cxd4, I needed to think about the position for what it is, not just because of a previous game where it was possible!
- I believe I was way too insensitive of White's Queenside expansion.
- I didn't use an engine to analyze this, but I am actually curious about a lot of things
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Here are the results from today's match, rapid and blitz respectively:
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A rapid win and blitz loss results in a match tie. My team is sitting at 2/5 (minus one score) with two matches left, we basically need to make the top half to qualify for the playoffs, so I believe we need to win both of our upcoming matches to get into the playoffs. I will document our efforts as usual!
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the games. Feel free to give feedback in the comments section, I will see you next week! 
*** POP QUIZ *** My second opponent's username was @wildpigsonthe7th ... do you know what the verb and nouns indicate in chess?
