Chess in Vegas! Pt 2
Well, we're back for the second part of this blog series. So I say we just pick up where we left off with r5? So after that slightly disappointing draw, I was given a very dangerous pairing, Ethan Song (1500p USCF 2062 FIDE), the reason this pairing was so dangerous was that my opponent is from the great country of Canada, and they haven't played a USCF event in 7 years until recently, so his USCF is very low. I knew I had to be on my A-game, lets look at the game!
So, I was pretty distraught after the game, not that my rating would suffer, but that I knew I could've done a lot better and I just gave it away.
So after that disappointing result, I woke up the next day and I was white against Austin Tang (2050 USCF 1950 FIDE), I saw this as a good pairing, this is a chance I have to get another win on the board and get back into the tournament. Let's take a look!
So not that bad of a result, and I gain a few points from the game, next game I have black against Luke Widjaja (2133 USCF 1933 FIDE), another strong player, let's see if I can get another good result before the day is done!
A little bit lucky, but a win is a win! And I'll take it.
Only one more day in the tournament, I played the Walter Browne blitz Saturday night and I got 6.5/12, a decent score, and I actually played 2 of the players I played in the main tournament!
In the 8th round, I'm slated to play Vikram Rajmohan (2190 USCF 2072 FIDE), after that last win, I was feeling confident goint into the game, so let's see what happened!
A rather disappointing result, not on paper, but much like the fourth game I took a "chicken" draw and I'm not proud of it, one of the things I need to work on.
Well the final round parings were up, and to my surprise, I got white again! Twice in a row, let's see if I can utilize the second white in a row vs. Steve Wongso (2242 USCF 2090 FIDE), with 4/8, winning the game means I get a positive score as one of the lowest seeds in the event! but losing means a -1 score, so this game is very important, let's jump in!
So, 4/9 isn't a bad score to end this tournament with, considering that I was 130th? seed out of roughly 150 (based on FIDE rating), so not that bad of a result, my USCF rating only increased 6 points because of my round 4 and 5 opponents, but I think I had a very succesful tournament, and I broke 1900 FIDE!!!!!!
Thanks for reading this long, two part blog series, I am going to try to catch up on my tournaments more (at least the big ones until the present) Stay tuned for Barber+U.S. Open blog?
Thanks for reading 
