Road to the first IM norm: Part 2

The 2013 European Team Chess Championship was held in Novotel Centrum hotel in Warsaw, Poland, in November 7th-18th. I was blessed with an opportunity to represent the Lithuanian national team in this competition and everything turned out much better than expected :) But we will get to that in due time! 

You can find the first part here: http://www.chess.com/blog/TVEDAS/road-to-the-first-im-norm-part-1

When I finally woke up the next day, I went and got myself a really nice buffet-breakfast and my dissapointment with letting the win slip away in yesterday's game was all but gone. I realized that OK, we lost that match, but we fought like lions against a very strong Greek team (which stayed near the top of the leaderboard for the entire tournament) and we really made them sweat to get that victory. There were definitely a lot of positives, and we as a team decided to focus on that. I think one of the reasons for our good performance in this tournament was our team spirit - even if someone would lose a game, no one would be mad about it, there were no secret agenda's going on or anything like that. It felt like playing for a family, and that gave us all really strong motivation. 

In round 2 we were paired against a very solid Polish 3rd team. Their entire team consisted of GMs so of course we were the underdogs again, but we felt that if we can play as well as we did versus Greece, we might have a chance. 

I had to play white versus GM Jacek Gdanski (ELO 2518 at the time) and against it was a very tense game. This is how it went: 

And again I did not manage to salvage the match - we lost 1.5-2.5. Unlike yesterday though, I got outplayed in this game for the most part and I never really had a chance for a win, so objectively speaking surviving and getting away with a draw was a really really nice result for me personally. But team wise, of course it felt horrible to lose two matches in a row by a smallest possible margin.

All the anger was taken out in the late-night gym session with my teammates, after which we went back to our rooms and had some well-deserved sleep. FYR Macedonia was waiting tomorrow - an absolute must win match if we wanted to achieve anything in this tournament! 

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Sorry for such a long delay after part 1 - exams and other stuff got in the way. Part 3 will come in shortly! 

Feel free to check out my youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/Tvedas and especially the last video where I am trying to comment on the play of my wife: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tJ5id-JIAs

If you like this format, let us know and we will continue making similar videos! Hope you enjoyed it and till the next time :)