My competitive experience in the first chess tournament promoted by Steem

Hello, everybody! Recently I made my first post talking about that I made the first official chess event integrating Steem, it was just an incredible experience and one that I'm quite proud of since from this moment on the Chess Association of Nueva Esparta State will be officially integrating Steem and the projects that support us in all the legal documents and journalistic articles made by the writers of the association, but this is something that I want to talk about later.

Today I want to take advantage of my free time to write about how I feel about the competitive result I got, despite having spent quite a bit of time on this competition. To be honest, I didn't make the demonstration I was expected to, but I still managed to get a good result.

The first day

On the first day there were only 2 rounds since the tournament started at 1:00 p.m., I must say that I had an excellent start, although my first opponent did not show up, in the second round I was already playing against one of the best players in my state. The game was incredible, even though I didn't make the best moves in the middle of the game, I was able to take an excellent strategic advantage in a certain point of the game (changing my rook for a knight), which according to my perspective gave me a better position (and which I confirmed in later analyses) and allowed me to add a lot of pressure to the game, winning the game incredibly.

I have the game in my notebook (it is a mandatory requirement to write down the plays in classic mode tournaments), so I will share it here:

Fen: r5k1/pp5R/3p1QK1/3P1B2/8/6P1/PP5P/2q5 b - - 9 34

PGN: [Event "?"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "????.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "?"]
[Black "?"]
[Result "*"]

• 1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. exd5 exd5 4. Nf3 Bd6 5. Bd3 Ne7 6. O-O O-O 7. c4 dxc4 8.
     Bxc4 Nbc6 9. Nc3 Bg4 10. Be3 Nf5 11. d5 Bxf3 12. Qxf3 Nxe3 13. fxe3 Ne5 14. Qe2
     Qh4 15. Rf4 Qh6 16. g3 g5 17. Rf5 g4 18. Ne4 f6 19. Raf1 Nf3+ 20. R1xf3 gxf3 21.
     Qxf3 Kh8 22. Bd3 Qg7 23. Nxd6 cxd6 24. Rh5 f5 25. Bxf5 Rf6 26. Qf4 Qf7 27. Qd4
     Kg8 28. Rxh7 Qe8 29. Qxf6 Qxe3+ 30. Kg2 Qe2+ 31. Kh3 Qf1+ 32. Kh4 Qc4+ 33. Kg5
     Qc1+ 34. Kg6 {
     
     Game may have continued...} (34. Kg6 Qh6+ 35.
     Rxh6 a6 36. Be6# {+M2}) *

This was the most incredible game I had and not only because of the victory, personally I am surprised by the precision with which I played and the way in which I was able to make the most of that small strategic advantage continues to surprise me until now. I feel that the way I played this game does not compare with the rest, I felt more concentrated and confident in what I was doing, which was completely different in the rest of the games.

Second day

I only played 3 games, from this day on my performance in the tournament was declining pitifully, on this day I felt different and with the result of the third round I started to feel a little disappointed, which I feel affected in the rest of my games. All my games of the day were draws, gaining only 1.5 points on the day and being something that disappointed me a lot, at the end of the day I already had 3.5 points in the overall ranking of the tournament, but the people I drew against in theory were at a lower level than the opponent I faced on my first day. Why did my level drop? Maybe I wasn't fully focused on these games, maybe I wasn't as dedicated as I was on the first day. I remember that in one of these games I managed to get a material advantage from the opening and played so passively that the game ended in a draw. I hope to improve this in my next tournaments.

Third day

It was not a very good day, unfortunately I lost the first game of this day and, worst of all, the game only lasted 18 moves. I'm really disappointed with my result in this game as I played too fast and didn't go deep into what I was doing, so I made some mistakes that gave the game away stupidly, so I'm to blame for not concentrating.

Final result

Despite not having given the perfect result, my final score was 4.5 points out of 7, leaving me 2nd in the overall ranking (U16 and U18) and 1st in the U18 ranking. Actually this tournament has not been one of the best and, as I want to resume my activity in chess, I want that in future events I can demonstrate a much stronger and concentrated game. I feel that I master tactical and strategic concepts and have a good calculation, but I cannot give my all due to lack of concentration or factors that do not allow me to be dedicated to the game. Hopefully I can give better results for the upcoming tournaments and opportunities to attend more important events may arise.

Links about the tournament:

• https://chess-results.com/tnr522011.aspx?lan=2&art=9&fed=VEN&turdet=YES&snr=1 (U-16 & U-18)
• https://chess-results.com/tnr522009.aspx?lan=2 (U-14)