Checkmate!! USA vs India | My Experience

The Checkmate USA vs India tournament just happened. As you all probably know India got swept 5-0. Today I'm going to break down my experience of the tournament. As a volunteer I arrived early at 4pm. When I arrived, I was shown to the break room where I dropped off all my stuff and headed to the Fan Zone to setup. At around 4:30 the boards and pieces arrived, and we set up the areas where other GMs would come and play people using the brand-new haptic clock.

This clock used a display connected to 2 buttons that the players would click to run the other players' time. This clock might seem stupid, but it was used because they had to give the players 1 second increment after 1 minute which could not be achieved on a DGT clock. The format was also really cool. The players would play 1 game, and the winner got a point. If there was a draw, they would then play a 5-minute tiebreak match instead of the normal 10-minute match. If this match again was a draw, they would do bullet tiebreak matches until someone won. Then the point would be awarded to the winning team. After we set up the boards that the GMs needed, Danny Rensh arrived for the book signing of his new book Dark Squares which I bought and got signed. Soon at around 5, GM Aryan Tari showed up and started playing matches against spectators using the haptic clock. After, waiting in line for 10 minutes I played him and got utterly obliterated in the endgame. 

After losing to Aryan Tari one of the other GMs was taking challengers but the line was a mile wide. So, after I signed up, I went to do other things until my name was called. I then went to the Free Play zone and played some chess games. As well as going to the break room to get a snack and soda. About an hour later at 6 or 6:30pm I was at the front of the line. I played the other GM and literally played the lowest quality chess of my life. I blundered so much it was embarrassing. I then proceeded to hang out in the playing hall with my friends until 7:30 when the matchups began. The first round was Arjun Erigaisi vs Fabiano Caruana, and the game was tense, but Fabiano won in the endgame.

The second was Tani vs Ethan and the crowd was going wild. Ethan and Tani were holding steady at the start but soon Ethan ended up playing bad and missed many chances to save the game from a loss to a draw. As Ethan tried to save the game he was lost and got checkmated by Tani.

The third round was Divya vs Carissa, and all my friends thought Divya would win this one and I did too. I was pretty sure she was the more experienced player, and she would win. But sadly, she played bad and ended up losing.

The 4th round was the exciting Sagar vs Levy. They drew the first game quickly by repeating moves. 

After they repeated moves, they played the second game and Sagar was winning, but all of a sudden there was a time penalty and Levy got 15 seconds. Don't even ask me what happened because even I don't know. Because of Levy's extra time he was able to win the game and put India down 4-0.

In the final round of the tournament Gukesh and Hikaru played a quick draw in the first round.

In the tiebreak round they proceeded to just end up drawing the game.

Finally, they went to bullet tiebreaks and Gukesh ended up losing a tight game to Hikaru which led to India getting 5-0ed.

Thank you for reading my blog! See you on the Chess Board, zZMaskz