Made it :-)

As I had predicted, I did get past 18 points in round 2 of the chess.com daily comp, and this was enough to win my group. I was on 19 with one game to finish, my closest rivals couldn't get past 18...and then the cheating cheat that I'd mentioned previously got a ban so I bumped up to 21, well clear of all the others (my only real rivals by this point were those he'd timed out against, and of course they didn't gain anything from his ban). I then miraculously won my final game which was a completely terrible mess of errors on both sides. 60% accuracy, chess.com said I played like a 1200 (and their assessments are usually rather generous IMO)! That's what happens when you follow a database line without understanding why. I was losing for a good bit of it too, against a 1300.

Most of the other games weren't very interesting at all. The general pattern is that they start out playing reasonable opening moves, then drop some material in a simple way, and it's just mopping up from there. I don't really feel like I played many good games. Perhaps the most interesting was one where I had bishop + knight to mate, muffed it and let my opponent escape the net (so he could have lasted the 50 moves to draw), then mated him against the edge with a cheap trap with just a few moves left!

In round 3 I will be somewhere below the middle of the group so it will be a struggle, I certainly won't progress but should at least have a bunch of decent games.