Another NM, another draw, with some irrelevant stories: Seafair Open Round 3-5

"I adjust", my opponent said. I'd heard this 100 times over our last 2 games that we have played. After EVERY move, my opponent had to adjust my piece, (Note: This story may have been altered to be more interesting to the reader, but there are no outright lies). But who was this character? And how had it gotten to this place? And this exact moment? Why was this game being played? And why am I writing this blog? Why are you even reading it after I critisized you in my last blog? Read on...

After my first draw with a master, I wasn't sure how I should feel. I was up a pawn, then down a pawn, so it was maybe fair. Fortunately, I didn't have to dwell on that too long. "Joseph, I have a new game that I want to show you", a buddy told me. Soon after, we spent the next hour playing the new game, and also a lot of bughouse. I took a few videos also, including one of me giving pieces to one of the players and making it really obvious so I could see everyone's reactions. As usual, I was made fun of by nearly everybody, spectator or player. As for the bughouse games themselves, I never lost, but my partners did a lot. Someone also came up with the idea of give-away bughouse, the disadvantage in "player-out" bughouse. Let me tell you a LONG story of how it came to be. (By the way, if you haven't noticed already, not much of my blogs actually talk about my games, so as I warned in my blog profile  "If you expect high quality chess instruction, you'll have to go somewhere else, because I'm not skilled at that yet".

Anyways, now to a story, which is 110% true...(That's a lie actually, but of course you can trust everything else coming up!)
The History of Give-away Bughouse 

A long time ago, on May 24, 2014, I was playing in the Chicago Open. At this time, the event was going well, and I had 2-0 and decent money chances. But this destroyed my chances.

After my second round win, as usual, I went to play bughouse with other chess players who lived in the Chicago area. After a few games, they finally agreed to let me play, and they were playing "player out". I was better than most of them, but a few were at my level so it seemed pretty fun. But, chess players aren't focused on having fun. One of the guys playing with us was annoying, and I foolishly started an arguement with him. Then we got to be partners. Let me just say that I wasn't excited, and I wasn't sure what to do, but I figured I better try to make up and win with him. So I start off with my normal bad moves, and after 10 seconds my opponent has all of these pieces! Then I realize that my partner has been giving away all of his pieces, and in exchange his opponent has agreed to not checkmate him. I lost pretty fast of course, and I was really upset. I was fuming and wondered if I should get revenge. Then in the next game, one nice little kid replaced him, and he did the same thing. The little kid handled it a lot better than me, only complaining that "it wasn't fair" and "I didn't do anything to you". I argued the same thing but this kid wouldn't stop. I was a pretty immature 7th grader, because I got really upset at this so I ended up flipping their sets upside down and taking my clock away. (2 days later my clock broke while they were playing with it). The thing is, it really gets players mad if they are serious about the bughouse games, and they are too young to realize that it doesn't matter if they get eliminated. 

It comes to the Twin Cities

Anyways, I brought this to the Twin Cities. Obviously I can't mention names, but at the Chess Castle in Minnesota, me and one kid were not getting along very well, and suddenly, with the player out, we got on the same team. Well, you may have heard that "stare in the eyes of a bully and you may be looking in the eyes of a former victim", and that was totally correct! I pulled off this trick on him, making a "truce" with my opponent (not to checkmate me) and then proceeding to blunder all of my pieces and get this kid eliminated. After the game, this kid was crying over it, and I felt kind of bad about it. I should have apologized, but with everyone around I felt like it would be too wierd to apologize. He did have a higher rating than me, but when we ended up playing the next round (karma rocks!) I simply couldn't play well, and he blew me off the board. My previous record against him was 1/3, and I was winning both our draws, so I usually could have put up a good fight with him. But not this time. After the game he thanked me for giving him the win, and he won a prize. 

I did this with another kid, but he wasn't upset. But after then I decided to be sure I wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings when doing this. 

Anyways, because of me they are probably doing this to the present day. Sorry Twin Cities for bringing such a plauge in your bughouse games. But don't worry, do "team-out" and you will solve all of your problems!

...and Seattle 

This was the second event that this happenned at. In the first one, no one had heard of this idea, but luckily my partner didn't get upset and we all had a pretty good laugh about it. But this trick came back to haunt me in this event. My partner decided to do it on me, and started to blunder all of his pieces! Luckily, me and my opponent agreed to a truce, and me and my partner were blundering pieces. In the end I actually managed to win on time, while the other games were stopped because players wanting to play were upset. Then we switched to Team Out and everything was fine. 

There are so many other stories I could tell right now, like how I felt at my last events in Minnesota and saying goodbye, or the memorable days I had running in the rain playing tag with buddies in the Chess Castle, but unfortunately (maybe fortunate for me, I have to do other things!) that will have to wait for a future blog or when you meet me in person (highly recommended!).

I'm aware that I use too many parentheses, in case you were interested. (I'm guessing you weren't).

But during the game, after he adjusted his pieces, I felt the same way I felt when I was tricked in bughouse, on a much smaller scale. (English teachers always recommend you to relate everything you write so the writing is better somehow.)

Anyways, I'm going to stop jumping from the past to the very distant past and so forth. I'll start at around 7:30pm, nearly an hour after the rounds were supposed to start, but they didn't start on time.

I couldn't think much. I was so sleepy! I yawned, and wasn't too excited that I would have to face Kyle Haining, as he is rated 2273, tied for first in the National High School Championships, and (most important) he has beaten me twice before! But whoops, I have to praise my opponent in a seperate paragraph, sorry!

My opponent in this game, Kyle Haining is an unbelievably talented youngster (who cares if he's older than me). His rating has gone up very quickly and he will probably continue to go up, unlike me. He plays for the Inglemoor team and steamrolled my team when we played them, in fact he beat me so badly that it was the only week that I didn't post a blog for! We lost 1.5-3.5. Our second encounter was in the Washington High School Championships, which wasn't a fair encounter since I had a bloody nose, so I lost easily. But 3rd time's a charm! It's really hard to go 3-0 against people in tournament play, I've only done it against one person I believe. Once again, I won't mention the name, since I decided to not mention anyone's names in the blog except if I'm playing them or if they are RookSacrifice (Or James Frasca or...)

Getting right to the action, it's hard to be sleepy and play good chess! But before I came up with a good idea. "I'll just play d4 and repeat his moves". While at first I was just joking, the more I thought of it, it was actually a good idea! But my opponent was around when I said that, so he made sure to stop it.

And now, the game, in which I was playing for a draw I luckily I got one!

So I guess this was a good result. But it didn't get better. I was very sleepy the next day and couldn't think at all. The headache caused me to lose to another master (The pairings weren't fair!)

Since I don't know what I was thinking during this game, I won't give notes. It was pretty bad.

In the last game, which I lost the notation from, we reached an interesting endgame, which I was winning,but the sleepy me couldn't evaluate it. But I can't remember it.

I drew, and ended up with 2.5/5, and gaining 12 rating points, and went to 1838, but the last day was quite bad. Hopefully my results will improve, which is unlikely. 

As for now, the next event is the FIDE Invitational event, which starts this Friday. I'll get ready to get revenge at players who have never done anything wrong to me, and remind them that if they lose, their game will be in my famous blogs and the whole world will tease them about it. CNN (Chess News Network), NBC (Now Brodcasting Chess), ABC (Absolutely Boring Chess), and MSNBC (More Stupid Now Brodcasting Chess), will give brodcasting of these important losses. And believe me, their ratings will be record high!

That's why I don't even need to remind them. None of the them watch the news of course. They are all reading this blog, hoping to find my opening prep, but instead realizing that my intimidation of them starts long before I play them. My methods of winning are something to frighten every tournament player. Once you are winning, you won't even have a chance.