Surprises
It is September 2018 already. I lost touch with chess.com and stopped playing seriously more than a year ago. I only played a handfull of games after May 2017. That was a real surprise to me: Chess was gone from one day to the other after an intense time for one and a half years. Never thought that would happen — but I guess I was a bit frustrated about a longer streak of lost games.
Well, I knew I would come back one day because I was still in two tournaments.
Unofficial 1st Chess.com Long Championship
This tournament that started on Nov 15, 2015 (nearly three years ago today!) still hasn't finished round 1. This means that I am waiting since July 2016 (!) for this tournament to continue. And — depending on the last two open games in two groups — it could take another year until round 1 will be completed. It is a farce somehow …
Besides that it was a surprise to me that — checking the status of that tournament recently — I found that I had been removed from the tournament. Digging deeper into this I saw 16 other players beeing removed. Most of them were leading the board of their groups. Chess.com support put me back on the list but the other 16 players are still out.
Another surprise was that I am qualified for round 2 in the other tournament I played. I struggled hard in round 1 of this tournament but finally had to accept that the two leaders were the clearly better players. So I was out even though the second player in that group lost our second game on time.
That fine player somehow disappeared and his account was closed. What happened? Did he stop play online chess? Did he quit chess at all? Is he dead?
That's something I think about sometimes generally when it comes to people I meet on the internet: What will happen to their accounts on facebook, photo forums and all the rest when people die? Well, I will probably never find out in this case.
Fact is that I will continue playing two tournaments — and I will take that as serious as I always do. And it is also fact that I will be playing one tournament as a replacement for another person who was a much better player than I am. I'll keep this in memory and see if this will encourage me to try even harder.
So I'll be back
My decision has been made: One of these days I'll start playing again. More to come then.
