First blood in chess.com round 2

Time for a more cheerful blog after yesterday's disappointment. Round 2 of the crazy chess.com daily chess competition started a couple of weeks ago. I'm in the 272nd group out of 276, and being at the end of the list has the nice feature that although I'm only 2nd seed in the group, the 1st seed is just a handful of rating points ahead. In fact I've overtaken them since the group started. The group has 2 x each of 1900, 1700, 1600, 1500, 1400, 1200 players who were all very closely paired in rating. It therefore seems that the seeding is done in the obvious zig-zag fashion ordering the ratings, putting 1-276 in a group each, then 277-552 in reverse order, etc. So that would mean our top seed is the 272nd by rating and I'm about 281st.  I didn't check in detail but it doesn't yet look like there are any cheats, the lowest-rated players just got a bit lucky with timeouts etc in round 1.

One of the 1500s already flamed out early and quit, but amusingly not before they had won a single game, against one of the 1600s who must be feeling a bit silly for moving so fast! I've done my standard thing of playing really slowly to start with, as I didn't want to risk having 22 tough moves to make all at once. Just today I finished my first two games, against someone who managed to drop significant material against me. Not terribly interesting games, I didn't play particularly incisively but did enough to win. Here they are:

History suggests that 20 points out of 22 will almost certainly be enough to go through, even 19 might suffice. But that still requires a reasonable level of precision against players who aren't mugs - they all got through round 1 after all. The top seed has lost one game so far (he's currently sitting on top spot on 9-1), and there are 4 others (including me so far) who haven't yet dropped a point between them. I've certainly got several more wins in the pipeline but still plenty of work to do. A silly mouse slip has made life very difficult in one game. But at least I've only got 18 games left now, which is a step in the right direction. And no St George openings this year, which has made life easier :-)