Identical Whippings

In round 3 I drew the identical twin of the guy who beat me in round 1...talk about psychological leverage. I immediately expected to lose, since all I could think was, "This guy beat me this morning." It didn't help that his rating was 27 points higher than his brother. He must be the older, wiser twin.

The game was awful. I made a bad move in the opening (not terrible, but one that lost me time soon afterwards) and instead of fixing it right away and losing tempo, I changed my strategic plan - to a worse one. It was a learning experience! Afterwards he told me that I'm "a lot better than most unrated players." A very gracious winner - although I felt like I finished the game terribly.

More on game 2 - that was an absolutely exhausting experience. With the 5 second/move time delay, our game took over two hours, and I had to focus my brain the entire time. Even in the last few minutes, with me up a rook, the guy made it very hard for me to finish. My heart was pounding! I had 3:00 left and he had 1:12 when he resigned, due to a queen fork of mine that forced him to trade queens with me. It was a great moment for me - and more intense than you would think. We were also the 2nd to last game to finish the round, so we had a group of people watching us. SCARY.

Round 3's game, we were the third to finish of 14.

One more game - I hope those kids weren't triplets.